FEATURE
Stories in Stone and Bone:
The Evolution of a Museum and an Interpreter
BEHIND THE ARTICLE
Updates to the museum’s Paleontology Gallery have started and will continue through the next year. Most fossils will remain on exhibit and will be accompanied by new interpretive signage and interactives. There are so many stories to tell in this space! Photo by Texas Science & Natural History Museum.
I looked up and met the gaze of a giant pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus, its head lifting after taking a drink from the streambank. The pterosaur’s eyes were unblinking and appeared to focus on me. My eyes filled with tears. Not from fear but a mix of joy, relief, and awe. It was August 2023, but I was transported to a subtropical woodland in the Big Bend region of Texas, 67 million years into the past.
The last time I saw the pterosaur was a month earlier—on my twenty-two-inch computer monitor. I took a breath and emailed the art team that the pterosaur was good to go. It was sent to the printer. Working with a local exhibit design company for over seven months, we created a digital art piece that was printed on fabric mounted over a lightbox display. Installation of the lightbox was taking place as I was leaving my office at Texas Science & Natural History Museum, and I had decided to wait until the next morning to experience the nineteen-foot pterosaur mural panel as a visitor would when entering the Great Hall of the museum.
The Quetzalcoatlus mural is just one component of new exhibits and programming at Texas Science & Natural History Museum. Formerly known as Texas Memorial Museum (TMM), this museum is a vital educational resource for all communities, exhibiting outstanding fossil specimens and facilitating connections between the public and the researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. Over the last twenty-four years I have served the museum in three capacities: vertebrate paleontology collections manager, senior biodiversity/paleontology educator, and currently as associate director. Like layers of rock that record time and life-changing events, my experiences as a scientist, educator, and leader at the museum continue to inform me and hone my skills as an interpreter.
Our museum’s focus is on science, but I have found that sharing its history increases engagement with a broader audience. Paleontology has played a significant role throughout the history of Texas Memorial Museum. In the 1920s, Texas geologists lamented the loss of Texas fossil resources as other museums traveled through the state collecting important specimens. What Texas needed was a state museum.
The call for a state museum was answered as part of the State Centennial celebrations in 1936. Construction began for the museum in June of that year, while temporary exhibits on the floor of a campus gym amazed visitors from across Texas. TMM opened to the public in January 1939, and outstanding specimens collected by Work Projects Administration (WPA) crews during a 1939-1941 statewide survey were put on display. I enjoy sharing the stories of those specimens with visitors, especially that of the glyptodont, which looks like a giant armadillo. It was found by a WPA crew digging caliche to build a road. A not-so-subtle reminder that you do not have to be a paleontologist to make a big discovery!
As a paleontologist, I find it a bit easier to wrap my mind around the concept of “deep time” or geological time measured in millions (and billions!) of years. I have learned from my interactions with teachers, students, museum visitors and even museum staff that challenges to understanding deep time include issues with scale (large numbers!), lack of direct observation of events in the past, and unfamiliarity with the fossil record.
My first experience with a museum exhibit overhaul happened in late 2003/early 2004 when TMM replaced the outdated and biologically segregated paleontology cases with new displays organized by time period and environment–giving visitors a glimpse into how the diversity of plant and animal communities in Texas changed through time. To complete the experience, we created the “Paleo Lab”: an exhibit lab staffed by volunteer educators/interpreters who provided museum visitors with an opportunity to learn about current paleontology projects, ask questions, have personal fossil finds identified, and engage in conversation on topics in the natural sciences.
A new mural featuring the giant pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus, captivates many of the museum’s visitors, including this elementary school student. Photo by Texas Science & Natural History Museum.
Senior Paleontology Educator (now Associate Director) Pamela R. Owen inspects the skull of a 220-million-year-old giant amphibian during the 2003 renovations to the paleontology exhibits at Texas Memorial Museum. Photo by Texas Science & Natural History Museum.
An effective way to connect people with fossils within the confines of museum exhibit galleries is to put fossils in their hands. And the Paleo Lab was just the place to explore a variety of actual fossils, including a 20,000-year-old mammoth molar, a 70-million-year-old mosasaur vertebra, and a 300-million-year-old scouring rush. There is nothing like tactile time-traveling! I managed the Paleo Lab until the museum temporarily closed in March 2022.
Yes. Closed. I thought TMM’s year-long temporary closure during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was tough. But a budget cut recommendation made by the university in the fall of 2021 had a significant impact on staff, which was already a skeleton-crew (pun intended). By late March 2022, it was down to me, a security guard, and the director.
In the same way major evolutionary transitions and/or extinction events mark the boundaries of geological time periods (think of the roughly simultaneous asteroid impact in the Yucatán, the extinction of all dinosaurs except for birds, and the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago), this closure, which ended in September 2023, brought changes but not a complete extinction. It resulted in a revitalization of the museum that continues today.
Visitors to Texas Memorial Museum’s Paleo Lab in 2006 compared cast replicas of saber-toothed cat teeth with Senior Paleontology Educator Pamela R. Owen (now Associate Director). A 20,000-year-old mammoth molar, a 70-million-year-old dinosaur vertebra, and a 100-million-year-old ammonite were also available to touch that day. Photo by Texas Science & Natural History Museum.
The Cretaceous sea that covered much of Texas left thick deposits of limestone quarried for use as a building stone in many historical buildings, including Texas Memorial Museum. The limestone enhances the Art Deco design of the building while quietly reminding all who enter that this is a place with a long history. As part of the extensive renovations within the building over last spring and summer, the limestone making up most of the forty-foot walls in the Great Hall was cleaned by stone conservators who removed eighty-seven-years' worth of dust and water stains. Home to our Quetzalcoatlus in-flight skeletal reconstruction installed in 1999, the Great Hall was completely scaffolded around the pterosaur to get the job done. And yes, I was a bit nervous about the entire process, but now I am one of the few people to view that giant pterosaur from above!
A 33-foot-long tyrannosaur skeleton now joins Quetzalcoatlus in the Great Hall. The Texas Titans exhibit gives us a glimpse into the Cretaceous community of Big Bend National Park, 67 million years ago. Photo by Texas Science & Natural History Museum.
As I began to reimagine exhibits in the Great Hall, the lone skeleton of Quetzalcoatlus inspired the creation of the Texas Titans exhibit. We needed another awe-inspiring creature from the same community–a tyrannosaur! The UT Austin graduate student that made the initial discovery of Quetzalcoatlus in Big Bend National Park also found a partial upper jaw (maxilla) of a tyrannosaur from a different site but within the same rock unit. This maxilla has been studied by several paleontologists with more than one idea about its identity. Because of its size and shape, this toothy fossil could be from a teenage T. rex, a new species of Tyrannosaurus (so not a rex), or a new genus of tyrannosaur. What a perfect specimen to demonstrate the nature of science! A cast of the maxilla was incorporated into a custom skeletal reconstruction of our “Texas tyrannosaur” and, with an accompanying mural, brings the Texas Titans to life.
With our short time frame for reopening as the Texas Science & Natural History Museum by the end of August 2023, new exhibits were planned for only the main floor. Updates to exhibits on the remaining floors would be completed in phases over the next few years. What we needed was a “priming gallery” to orient visitors to what can be explored on the other floors, including introductions to terminology and ecosystems. I worked with the exhibit design company to create an overview of the last 600 million years of life in Texas that includes a large-scale “timeline” of stunning imagery–the emphasis being on the artwork and not names of time periods and dates, although they are presented along with highlighted stories describing the ways life has evolved over time. The timeline also brings us toward the future as we consider the impacts humans make on the environment, including climate change and biodiversity loss.
LEFT: A large-scale timeline takes visitors on a deep time journey through major transitions in the diversity of life in Texas over the last 600 million years. Photo by Texas Science & Natural History Museum.
RIGHT: Texas Transformation connects deep time events to the exhibits and stories presented on the other floors of the museum. Photo by Texas Science & Natural History Museum.
This new exhibit, Texas Transformation, includes a four-minute paleogeographic time-lapse animation illustrating that what we recognize as the geographical state of Texas today has been part of supercontinents, under seas, and south of the equator. I remember discussing with the team about how fast the animation should run and would visitors stand and watch for four minutes. Do folks watch the complete animation? Yes, often multiple times! I cannot help but smile when I overhear young adults, families and multigenerational groups, and school groups talking about what they are seeing. They are enjoying a deep time experience that can have an impact on how they see the world.
Texas Science & Natural History Museum continues to evolve as do I, especially because I look forward to learning something new every day while not forgetting the past. There are new exhibits and experiences to create, and stories to tell. I have embraced the challenge of engaging visitors to think about deep time as an extension of more familiar historical timescales and to consider the future. It is my hope that I inspire the interpretive community to do the same, forging stronger connections with our dynamic planet and shared deep history.
Visitors explore deep time as they view a four-minute paleogeographic animation in the Texas Transformation Gallery. Photo by Texas Science & Natural History Museum.
