BALBOA PARK – The San Diego Natural History Museum (The Nat) is set to open its new Paleontology Center this Friday, June 6, where visitors can watch scientists work in real time.
The new center on the Balboa Park institution’s basement floor is named after longtime employee and paleontologist Tom Deméré, who has headed up the museum’s paleontology division since 1994. The center has been years in the making, as large specimens such as whale fossils stored in a rented Chula Vista warehouse have been moved back to the 150-year-old museum.
The museum touted the center for bringing The Nat’s entire collection of over 1.5 million specimens under one roof after decades apart. Cases previously on the third floor moved to the new visible collection room freed up space elsewhere for exhibits. Now all five stories of The Nat will have permanent exhibits on show.
A major part of the new center is visual storage of specimens on rolling stack shelving. Visitors will be able to watch scientists at work behind glass walls and see fossilized bones like whale skulls on open shelves, giving a sense of proportion to ancient creatures.
From Gila monsters preserved in jars and tiny bees on pins to drawers of teeth from extinct sea mammals and taxidermied desert creatures, many specimens are on display for the public in the exhibit gallery. The exhibit, called “Amazement in the Basement,” teaches visitors how the museum cares for its collection and studies it to learn about ancient life.
Bison bones found during 2020 demolition of Qualcomm Stadium
The center also includes a new lab space giving visitors a behind-the-scenes look at fossil processing.
At a media preview night, volunteer scientists were carefully cleaning bison bones found during the demolition of Qualcomm Stadium in 2020. A museum team has worked to clean and preserve the specimen over the past five years to learn about ancient life in San Diego.Through an open window, volunteers answered questions and demonstrated the process of cleaning bone fragments.
Work remains before scientists can flip the fossil to see the other side of the bison, still in the original jacket crafted to safely transport it. The skull and vertebrae are approximately 125,000 years old. Museum staff speculate it is from an extinct giant species, the Bison latifrons.
The Nat’s paleontology collection is constantly growing, with new specimens flowing in. Already, it has one the largest record of 45-million- and 30-million-year-old land mammals known from the southwestern U.S., as well as some of the only dinosaur remains in California.
With the new permanent exhibit in the basement, visitors will have the chance to see the collection and the scientists processing it for themselves.
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