Carnegie's Dinosaurs: A World Treasure
Carnegie
Museum of Natural History sets its goal: to be the world's premier place
for experiencing "Dinosaurs in their World."
By R. J. Gangewere
What would you do if you had one of the best collections
of dinosaur fossils in the world, and other museums across America were
drawing record crowds by upgrading their displays of dinosaurs? And in addition, many of the other
museums' displays depended upon replicas, while your research collections
and displays were rich with the real fossils?
In Chicago, the Field Museum recently bought and mounted
a newly unearthed Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton
for $15 million, and then saw its attendance increase from 1.5 million to
2.36 million people (67%) in 1999.
In New York, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled a new
display of vertebrate evolution, including dinosaurs, and increased
attendance by 20% (1994-95). In
Philadelphia, The Academy of Natural Sciences saw a 46% increase in
attendance in three months after renovating its dinosaur hall.
The answer to the question is easy. An institution with
great fossils from the Age of Dinosaurs should be a national destination
for dinosaur lovers. It should
create exciting new displays, and showcase the latest findings of
science. "We have the facts,
the raw materials," says curator of paleontology Mary Dawson, who adds
that this "brings with it an opportunity and a
responsibility." The dinosaur
fossils at Carnegie Museum of Natural History are now, after a century,
conservatively estimated to be worth more than $200 million. Few other museums could match this as a
scientific resource, or as a building block for a new dinosaur exhibit.
Dinosaurs became the trump card for Carnegie Museum of
Natural History in 1899 when Diplodocus
carnegii was discovered. Andrew
Carnegie paid expert bonehunters to excavate this specimen and others for
his "Home of the Dinosaurs" in Pittsburgh, and he established a
collection that included 20 mountable skeletons, represented ten dinosaur
species, and was rich in isolated bones and partial skeletons. Before his
death in 1919 he had internationalized the museum's reputation by giving
replicas of Diplodocus carnegii
to nine capital cities around the world. What's more, the fossil-rich
"Carnegie Quarry" in Utah became famous, and the United States
government turned it into a national park: Dinosaur National Monument.
The
floor plan of the new Dinosaur Hall exhibit shows the new atrium for
Cretacious life (transformed from the old Dinosaur Hall).
In addition to great fossil collections from the Late
Jurassic and Late Cretaceous periods (163 to 65 million years ago), today's
Carnegie Museum of Natural History has excellent paleontological
collections of invertebrates, fish and plant fossils from the Age of Dinosaurs.
Even the relatively rare mammals are represented. With these strengths, the
museum could realistically create an unrivalled exhibit of the real world
in which dinosaurs lived.
With this in mind, director Bill DeWalt and Carnegie
Museum of Natural History have made plans to renovate the 1907 Hall of
Dinosaurs, and add an adjacent newly constructed atrium to one of America's
premier dinosaur displays. This, in turn, could open up a new way of
experiencing the entire museum. "The most exciting thing," says DeWalt,
"is the real opportunity we have to organize our museum in a way that
has never been done before. We want
to 'improve the flow' for our visitors and deliver the key themes of our
scientific research in an unforgettable way."
The major new first floor exhibit, Dinosaurs in their World, would be the catalyst for this major
reorganization. Visitors would
gather in an orientation hall at the front of the museum, then take a
progressive tour of all three floors, from the ancient past with its dinosaurs
(first floor), to biodiversity with mammals and plants, (second floor), to
human evolution and cultural diversity (third floor). The third floor rear
would also have a new large space for changing exhibitions--a destination
for all visitors.
Jurassic Hall model-(at the top) the sauropod Camarasaurus feeds on high
vegetation. Allosaurus (lower left) looks for prey, and the tail of the
giant plant-eating Apatosaurus (lower right) extends overhead.
“This is an incredibly exciting time for Carnegie Museums
and for western Pennsylvania,” said Ellsworth Brown, president of Carnegie
Museums of Pittsburgh. “The
discovery and display of dinosaurs are rich parts of our history, and they
are among Andrew Carnegie’s most enduring legacies to Pittsburgh and the world. With this expansion, we will continue to
carry out his vision of serving our communities regionally, nationally, and
internationally by leading rather than following.”
Dinosaurs in their
World will be an important tourist draw for Pittsburgh, with projections
that indicate that it could double the number of yearly visitors, from
about 300,000 to 600,000. In
addition to tourists, the attraction for children and families is
especially strong. Pulitzer
prize-winning science writer John Noble Wilford expressed it this way:
"Dinosaurs afford children an early opportunity to triumph over their
peers and adults. Children learn to
pronounce the difficult names of dinosaurs, a facility beyond adults, and
recite all their vital statistics…This may be the first time the child
experiences a sense of grownup intellectual accomplishment," (The
Riddle of The Dinosaur, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1986:67)"
Every museum
makes its own interpretation
Museums create their own dinosaur exhibits by building
on their own collections. And, when it comes to designing a dinosaur
exhibit, each museum has got to "roll the dice, with no guarantee that
one approach will be more successful than another," says Christopher
Beard, curator of Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Thus, one museum will make its prized specimen an icon
in the entrance hall, and another without fossil material will turn to
casts and replicas to tell a story. Another museum will specialize in maps
of species evolution.
While some argue that a family tree of plant-eating
dinosaurs is the most educational, others say that a display with
contemporary plants and animals, showing environmental biodiversity, is
much more interesting to the average person. "I think people want to be
transported in time, to have that picture in time," says curator David
Berman of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Curator Mary Dawson says that making an icon of a
specimen, as Carnegie did with "Dippy" (Diplodocus carnegii), served its purpose at the time for making
Pittsburgh known for having the largest reconstructed specimen. But now, she reasons, with a century's
worth of accumulated knowledge about ecology and past environments, Carnegie Museum of
Natural History should take a different step forward. "Science is not static," she
says, noting that in 150 years the notions about how dinosaurs walked
changed dramatically. Today, for
example, there is a developing science about interpreting the circumstances
of a dinosaur's death. It does not
follow, for example, that an adult female fossil skeleton excavated with
its limbs outstretched around a nest of eggs meant that the adult had a
maternal instinct to protect those eggs when she died. Science continues to raise questions, and
provide answers.
Dinosaurs:
one of evolution's greatest success stories
Dinosaurs dominated the planet for 160 million
years--159 million years longer than humans have been on earth. This is an amazing story of successful
adaptation, and it raises many questions. Science strives to know more
about dinosaur behavior, about predatory skills and defense techniques,
about the feeding habits of giant vegetarian sauropods, and the diet of Tyrannosaurus rex. Such questions about the world of
dinosaurs will be the focus of Carnegie Museum of Natural History's new
exhibits on Dinosaurs in World
during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
In the Late Jurassic (163 - 144 million years ago), the
world of dinosaurs was a huge super-continent called Pangaea, which was
beginning to split into separate continents. There were primitive ferns and
evergreens, a tropical climate that fostered the growth of insects, and the
evolution of birds, flying reptiles,
turtles, frogs, lizards and snakes.
Dinosaurs grew amazingly diverse, from the giant vegetarians Diplodocus, Apatosaurus and Camarasaurus, to the meat-eating
predator, Allosaurus, the
"lion of the Jurassic."
About 30 million years later, in the Cretaceous, their
world had changed. The continental landmasses had separated further, the
climate was cooler, and flowering plants had evolved. This gave rise to new
plant-eating animals, and diverse dinosaurs that could feed on them as
well. North America was divided into
two parts by an immense shallow seaway from the Arctic to the Gulf of
Mexico, and the seas teemed with life, including giant, voracious marine
lizards--mosasaurs. Tyrannosaurus
rex, with longer teeth and a larger head than any other land carnivore,
evolved into the top predator about 67-65 million years ago.
But soon a large extinction event eliminated all
dinosaurs and much of their world forever.
This event and the world it ended are perpetually fascinating
to the public.
What are the challenges facing Carnegie Museum of
Natural History's new Dinosaurs in
their World? Remounting the old
dinosaur specimens, with their marvelously cast steel supports (not to be
matched anywhere, say the experts), and presenting them in correct poses is
one challenge. Integrating every
dinosaur in a continuous story of evolution is another. Expanding the first and second floors,
where research areas need to be relocated, is another. So is adapting two open areas--the
interior courtyard and the present three-story rear area, into new
exhibition space.
"There is no museum in the world more capable of
meeting these challenges, " says director Bill DeWalt. "And the final result will be an exciting and unforgettable
walk through time, on all three levels of the museum. " This could be
one of the great achievements for Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh in the 21st
century."
See the expanded Dinosaur Hall online at
www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmnh/exhibits/future
|
