CU fossil collection will expand into PRI's Museum of the Earth

Many of Cornell's natural history collections -- some of the foremost of their kind -- are scattered across campus and around the Ithaca area, often housed in warehouse-like conditions where access for scholars and the public is both difficult and uninviting. That will change next year for two categories of collected materials. The university's fossil collections will move into the Paleontologial Research Institution's soon-to-open Museum of the Earth. And the vertebrate collections will find a more accessible home in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's new Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity. This is the first of two articles on these significant moves.

Warren Allmon, Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) director, and Jonathan Hendricks, a Cornell Ph.D. student in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, look at a 3 million-year-old cone snail fossil at PRI in Ithaca, Sept. 17. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Adrianne Kroepsch '03

Sometimes a fossilized creature "moves around" more while petrified in a rock than it ever did while it was living and breathing eons ago. From McGraw Hall to North Campus to the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) -- and soon to the PRI's new Museum of the Earth -- the Cornell fossil collection has seen lots of action since Ezra Cornell purchased it in 1865 for $10,000.

"As legend has it, when Ezra started the university, he bought the fossil collection from a guy named Colonel Jewitt who had offered it to Yale first," explained PRI Director Warren D. Allmon. "But Yale didn't have the money, so he raised the price and Ezra bought it."

The collection seems to have been in flux ever since. It was housed in McGraw Hall until 1932, when Cornell geology professor Gilbert Dennison Harris took it upon himself to move most of the collection to North Campus, fearing it might be destroyed if fire struck the wood-lined McGraw. The fire-resistant alternative that he built of cinderblock served as the home of PRI until the institution relocated in 1968 to its present, more stately quarters -- a former orphanage on Trumansburg Road, two miles north of downtown Ithaca. Other parts of the Cornell fossil collection were shuttled from McGraw to Kimball Hall to Snee Hall, before finally settling farther above Cayuga's waters at the PRI in 1996.

Although not formally connected to Cornell, PRI houses all of Cornell's non-botanical fossils and recent mollusk (non-fossilized shell) collection. According to Allmon, the fossil collection at PRI, a combination of Cornell fossils and PRI fossils, contains between 2 and 3 million specimens, making it the seventh largest fossil collection in the country.

The collection of millions of fossils is in moderate disarray, admits Allmon, who also is adjunct associate professor in Cornell's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. In the PRI basement a visitor would expect a lesson on fossils, not physics. But "having millions of specimens in one large room demonstrates that entropy [a measure of disorder] is the most powerful force in the universe," Allmon said. There are fossils in shelves, shoeboxes, crates and jars, stacked high and low, from near and far. The collection boasts, among other things, the largest representation of Venezuelan fossils outside of that country. Some boxes of fossils haven't been opened since the 1930s.

PRI staff members and volunteers, including Cornell students, spend some of their time in the basement wielding toothbrushes and buckets and labeling tags in an effort to keep fossil entropy in check. According to Allmon, they are nearly halfway through organizing the collection taxonomically. Fortunately, the institution will gain the advantage of more space when it opens its Museum of the Earth next spring. Parts of the fossil collection will go on display in the new 18,000-square-foot facility, and the remainder will move to the current exhibit space upstairs from its cramped basement quarters.

At present the Finger Lakes region does not have easy access to a museum of natural history. As Princeton paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn said in 1912: "The museum is not one of the luxuries of civilization, but an essential and vital force in the enlightenment of the people. Every community, small or large, needs its museum as it needs its schools and its churches." Planners hope the Museum of the Earth will provide a center of earth-science education to a regional audience of more than 1.5 million people, taking its visitors on a journey through time.

"The public side of a natural history museum like the Museum of the Earth is meant to show off a tiny bit of the collection in order to generate enough interest to support the rest of the stuff that we have," explained Allmon. "That is how every natural history museum in the world works. Go to the Smithsonian and you see groups of schoolchildren, but what you don't see is the 99.9 percent of the collection that is behind locked doors. It's all about having the public education side and the research side melded together."

Even without the Museum of the Earth, the fossil collection would be a national resource for the scientists who use it. The Cornell collection specifically features exceptional specimens like Burgess shale. "Every paleontology or evolution class in the world hears lectures on this stuff," said Allmon. "Burgess shale is famous because it's very old and the fossils inside of it are soft-bodied. It's so detailed that it's almost like having the living animal in front of you." The shale specimens came to the university in the 1920s, shortly after the shale site was discovered in the Canadian Rockies. However, the Burgess shale specimens lay forgotten in a box until only recently.

The collection is full of similarly intriguing stories. There is a 35 million-year-old skull of an early camel, with its brain, preserved by mud, still intact. And there are relatives of coral that were found with other fossils around the Beebe Lake dam and at the university quarry atop Ithaca Falls. A rare fossilized jelly fish and a floating sea cucumber are among the abundance of fossils that over the years people have found and brought in for identification, only to discover that nobody knew what they were because they had never been seen before.

Once volunteers have finished their dusty task of cataloging, many rare specimens will be on display for the first time in the Museum of the Earth, presenting both a history of Cornell and of the Ithaca area.