Meet the Neighbors: The Dinosaurs Next Door

Soon after our arrival in Ithaca a month ago, Frank and I began our exploration of the Finger Lakes area of New York state.  Knowing that winter can come early here we’ve taken advantage of the many pleasant late summer days to poke around and get a better sense of the place we’ll call home for the next couple of years. 
  
On one of our treks along Highway 96, I was excited to catch a glimpse of the Paleontological Research Institute.  Could it be – a dinosaur museum less than a mile from my new home?  I’ve been fascinated by dinosaurs since childhood and here they were in my backyard!  Sort of.  PRI is home to the Museum of the Earth, which sponsors numerous educational exhibits and events, including the History of Life series that kicked off last Wednesday, September 21.  The free classes begin promptly at 5:30 p.m. and continue weekly through October 26.

Sixty minutes isn’t much time to cover 4 million years of Earth’s geological history and complex theories of the origins of life, but Dr. David Campbell gave it a good shot. (link to his chapter in The mollusks: A guide to their study, collection, and preservation)

Armed with that hour’s worth of information, I returned to the museum on Saturday to take a look around.  PRI boasts one of the largest fossil collections in the United States, numbering between 2 and 3 million specimens.  The collections are especially rich in invertebrate fossils, for example trilobites.  Those particular organisms give me the willies – too much resemblance to some creature once seen in an old horror movie, I suppose – but PRI has them in abundance, ranging in size from the barely visible to almost 3 feet long. Learn more about the region’s former denizens of the water in Trilobites of New York: An Illustrated Guide (2002). 

Land-wise, New York was once home to dinosaurs and mastodons – though not at the same time, and much later than the tribe of trilobites.  The museum’s mascot is a coelophysis nicknamed Cecil, represented in bronze sculpture at the entrance to the grounds.  An early dinosaur, coelophysis was a small, carnivorous biped with hollow limb bones.  Don’t confuse this guy with the velociraptors that terrorized the cast of Jurassic Park; coelophysis was a fine little hunter but not nearly as advanced in development as velociraptor.  Still,  Cecil looks pretty ferocious...I wouldn't want to meet him alone in a dark jungle!

The Museum of the Earth is also home to the mastodon of Hyde Park, the first of two largely intact skeletons recovered through collaboration with Cornell University in PRI's Mastodon Project.

The excavation project was documented by Discovery Channel in Mastodon in Your Backyard.  A clip from the program shows the muddy beginnings of extricating the bones from a family’s backyard pond.

 The mastodon exhibit includes an artist’s rendition of mastodons on Ithaca’s south hill – in approximately the location of Ithaca College.  Earlier this year IC abandoned its efforts to choose a suitable mascot, though the college will retain the ‘Bomber’ nickname.  I was rooting for the Lake Beast, but on second thought perhaps the mastodon would be a very cool mascot – way better than a flying squirrel, no question.



A few steps away from the mastodon exhibit is the Gorge Garden, a representation of the northeastern U.S. during the Ice Age, complete with tundra vegetation and glacial erratics.

One aspect of the museum that I found especially impressive was the combination of art with science.  In the lobby, Primordial Imprints by Jonathan Paul Bennett fuse glass and metal into castings of a variety of fossils.  The trilobite in glass is pretty cool, but my favorite piece is the set of antlers that gleams like a polished mineralized fossil.  Downstairs, Art Murphy’s photographic Devonian Dreams present invertebrate fossils from the Catskills in brilliant color.  Perhaps it’s the use of color, but there is a real immediacy to Murphy’s images – a sense of living organisms, not ancient remains.  Both exhibits are amazing and worth the price of admission.  Primordial Imprints runs through November 7; Devonian Dreams runs through January 8, 2012.

The main take-away from my short visit to the museum is a strong impression of the interconnectedness of life across the time continuum.  I don’t mean in some collective conscious way, but in how what came before affects our lives today and how today’s perspective affects the standpoint with which we regard the past.  
Today I live in an apartment complex built on a hillside overlooking a lake carved out by glacial activity.  The icy lands once roamed by mastodons some 10,000 years ago are now marked by corn fields and grape vineyards; we understand the lives of the mastodons through our (provisional, imperfect) knowledge of Earth’s geology and contemporary animals.  I’m  trying to understand a little better.  We’ll see what the History of Life series unfolds.