Historic estrangement ends with PRI-Cornell affiliation agreement

By Roger Segelken

Eighty years after a disgruntled Cornell geology professor, Gilbert D. Harris, picked up his fossils and went home -- to establish the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) in an emphatically off-campus backyard -- the science of ancient life at Cornell is set to expand significantly, with the signing of an affiliation agreement between PRI and Cornell.

For its part, Cornell gets another link in its network of "distributed museums," with the addition of the Museum of the Earth, which PRI built and opened about six miles northwest of campus in 2003.

"And PRI gets, among other things, the opportunity to reach more of the community and the wider world," said the institution's fourth director, Warren D. Allmon, of some highly successful educational-outreach programs PRI offers to persuade students of all ages that earth science is not as dull as dirt.

This mastodon tooth, which PRI acquired in a trade with SUNY Geneseo's Department of Geological Sciences, was originally found near Geneseo in the 1830s. This tooth also was illustrated in Chapter 17 ("Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds") in former New York State Geologist James Hall's Geology of the Fourth District, also in the mid-1800s. Paleontological Research Institution
Cornell student volunteers remove purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria), a destructive and invasive plant, from PRI grounds. Paleontological Research Institution	Visitors explore an exhibit at PRI's Museum of the Earth at the museum's second annual Community Day Celebration, held Sept. 25. Peter Terlaak Poot

Cornell's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), the modern version of Harris' home department, is looking forward to increased connections to PRI's expertise in earth history education at pre-college and post-college levels, as well as its research opportunities, according to EAS Chair Teresa E. Jordan. "Just as a central theme in PRI's Museum of the Earth is to illustrate that the biological, physical and chemical systems interact," she said, "this is an important thrust of Cornell research, which can benefit from PRI's extensive collections of ancient and modern life forms."

"With PRI's Museum of the Earth, Cornell joins other great universities that focus traditionally on zoology while offering to scholars, as well as to the public, wonderfully accessible centers of inquiry," said Thomas Eisner, Cornell's Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology. He cited Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale before he added: "Here in Ithaca we offer 'distributed museums' throughout the community, all linked by the Ithaca Discovery Trail. The Museum of Vertebrates is at the Lab of Ornithology; the living plants are at Cornell Plantations' arboretum; the Sciencenter is downtown; the Johnson Museum of Art is in the center of campus; and now another jewel -- the Museum of the Earth."

Stephen F. Hamilton, Cornell's associate provost for outreach, said: "The affiliation agreement cements Cornell's partnership with PRI in helping children, teachers and members of the general public learn more about science."

The prolonged estrangement began with a dispute over fire safety. Harris, a Cornell professor from 1894 to 1934, was nearing retirement and intended to leave his extensive invertebrate fossil collection and library to the university -- on one condition: that the university provide a suitable, fire-proof building with nonflammable furnishings.

When Cornell demurred, Harris built his own facility of concrete, with metal fixtures, next to his home in the Cornell Heights section of Ithaca. He filled it with many thousands of fossils, laboratories, books and the offices of PRI, which was chartered as an independent educational institution by the state of New York in 1933. Harris even found space for the printing presses for his two scientific journals, Palaeontographica Americana (which had begun publication in 1916) and Bulletins of American Paleontology (since 1895, and now the oldest journal of its kind in the Western Hemisphere) in his homely edifice.

Architectural aesthetics and elbow room improved significantly with PRI's 1968 move to West Hill, to a 12,000-square-foot stone structure at 1259 Trumansburg Road that was once an orphanage for the Odd Fellows fraternal organization. There was space for PRI's growing specimen collection, now one of the largest in the United States, and for the library, which grew to 50,000 volumes. The American Association of Museums called PRI's collection "one of the world's premier research resources," and the Institute of Museum and Library Services said it was "exceptional," "world class" and "a premier resource."

The view across the lake was spectacular, but still there were few Cornell ties. Harris' daughter had stipulated, while endowing PRI, that the institution would forfeit its endowment if it ever merged with the university.

Cross-lake relations began to improve when Allmon was hired as director in 1992. An adjunct associate professor, he teaches classes in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, guest lectures in other classes on campus and is primary adviser to several Cornell graduate students. He arranged for the university's quarter-million non-botanical fossil specimens (including many purchased by founder Ezra Cornell) to move in 1995 to PRI, where they are more available to faculty members and students than they have been in a generation. Also there is the university's modern mollusk collection (the Newcomb Collection), whose curator, Robin Seeley, is based at PRI.

Research collaborations of mammoth proportions began in 1999 with the Mastodon Project, which resulted in three Ice Age skeletons excavated, in part by Cornell students and staff, being displayed at PRI. The so-called Hyde Park Mastodon (from a Hyde Park, N.Y., pond) is one awesome feature of the Museum of the Earth.

Little shelled things are represented in the museum's exhibits, of course. But Allmon had determined early on that the phylum Mollusca contains insufficient charismatic megafauna to spin turnstiles at the museum and had broadened its scope to include earthly organisms of all sorts and dimensions. A 44-foot skeleton of a northern right whale hangs from the ceiling of the 18,000-square-foot, $10.6 million, design-award-winning museum. And a dinosaur -- albeit a smallish one, Coelophysis, that lived in what is now New York state around 200 million years ago -- is the museum's logo creature.

Research accomplishments by Cornell faculty members are featured among the museum's exhibits. In addition, Cornellians are volunteers and work-study students at the museum, and PRI's board of trustees includes four Cornell faculty members, two staff members and several prominent alumni.

And now the relationship will be official -- or at least semiofficial.

"The affiliation agreement is defined more by what it is not than what it is," Allmon observed. It is not a financial arrangement of any sort, he says, and the words 'Cornell University' will not be attached to the institution's already-unwieldy, 13-syllable moniker. "It's really just a beginning, an opportunity to expand the connections that we already have with the university."

"But it's certainly not a merger," Allmon emphasizes, before noting that part of the Harris codicil has become a moot issue. "We spent down the endowment," he acknowledged, "to build the museum."