By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

Visitors to the Sternberg Museum of Natural History will soon have the opportunity to watch and interact with scientists as they process fossils.

The museum received $160,000 from Dane G. Hansen Foundation, Mike and Pam Everhart and many other individuals to construct a 750-square-foot paleontology prep lab. The lab will include a 12-foot sliding window that will open and allow visitors to interact with scientists as they prepare fossils.

“This is a chance to really upgrade and renovate our ability to interact with the public, show off what we do in getting things from the field to the research collection to the exhibits. You’ll really get to see what happens at the museum,” museum director Reese Barrick said.

Barrick said this interaction will help both the students and the public. The public will learn more about the animals, and the students working in the lab will get hands-on experience speaking and interacting with museum guests.

The new lab also significantly expands the museum’s research space, which will give the museum opportunities to train students and volunteers in fossil preparation and move fossils more quickly from the field to the museum’s collection.

The additional space will allow the museum to add equipment and small separate research lab. This will facilitate Dr. Laura Wilson, museum curator, in her study of fossil histology. Wilson slices bones into very small pieces and evaluates them under a microscope, research that helps determine how an animal grew.

Some animals grow slowly over their whole lives, Barrick said. While other animals, such as mammals, grow quickly in their early years and then stop growing. Some animals’ bones resemble the growth rings of trees and can be used to determine age or even gender.

The information gleaned from histology studies can also be used to extrapolate ancient animals’ ecologies.

“We know as mammals we have a pretty high metabolisms and we eat a lot,” he said. “You can figure out how many grocery stores in a town it is going to take to feed people. You can run that with animals. If you have an elephant, how many acres is it going to take to live in and feed it? Whereas if you have an elephant-sized thing that has the metabolism of a lizard, it doesn’t take nearly as much space.

“We have things like our big mosasaur over here and our plesiosaur over there. If we can look at how fast those things grew, we can get an idea of how much those things had to eat. You can work back and figure out how much food was in the ocean period. How many fish did there have to be to feed all these giant monsters and how many smaller fish did there have to be to feed these bigger fish all the way down to these single-cell organisms?”

The lab should be completed by Christmas and all the equipment in place by mid-January.

The lab construction has set in motion a major reconstruction in several other areas of the museum.

To make way for the lab in the Fossil Gallery, the Rocks of Western Kansas exhibit had to be taken down. That is being moved to the Exploring Earth Sciences Gallery. Five cases in the Earth Sciences Gallery that were dedicated to an exhibit titled Fossils Through Time have been take off of exhibit and the fossils returned the museum collection.

Rocks of Western Kansas should be in its new home by Christmas, as well.

The rest of the Exploring Earth Sciences Gallery will also change very drastically. A new exhibit will eventually be added that will explore the invertebrates of the Kansas seaway, such as clams and ammonites.

Next week, the museum will pick up a new $100,000 collection of minerals that is being donated by a private collector. It will be added where the fluorescent minerals display is now.

The rest of the Earth Sciences Gallery will be dedicated to explain the evolution of the grasslands in Kansas over the last 50 million years, which will encompass the Paleocene through Miocene eras.

Finally, visitors to the museum will walk into the ice age exhibit, which includes skeletons of large mammals of the time period, including a mammoth. This exhibit will largely remain the same.

Barrick said the museum has considered for some time restructuring its exhibits to show the evolution of the Kansas landscape from an inland sea, to a closed canopy forest to the grasslands we see today.

“I think we want to give them a more comprehensive idea of the changes in life and ecology through the Cretaceous of Western Kansas in a more inviting, exciting and appealing way, so they will spend more time, be more enthused about what they are seeing and come back and learn a lot more about what Kansas is like — what the Cretaceous was like and learn a lot more about the value of rocks and minerals,” Barrick said.

He said many people see minerals as shiny, bright items, but they may not understand the full economic values of minerals and how they are used in industry and how they end up in household goods.

When the museum received the funding for the paleontology lab, it jump-started renovations of the rest museum. The funds for the paleontology lab have already been secured. However, the museum will still need to raise money for the further renovations of the invertebrate, mineral and Paleocene through Miocene exhibits.

It will likely be three to four years before all the renovations and new exhibits are complete, depending on fundraising. The museum will need about $50,000 to $60,000 to finish the exhibits. Barrick said he did not anticipate any museum closures associated with the renovations.

Donors can give by visiting the Sternberg website and clicking on the Donate button at the bottom of the homepage. This will take you to the Fort Hays State University Foundation page. You will need to indicate on this page that you want the money to go to the Sternberg.

The museum will continue to feature traveling exhibits In its rotating exhibit space. This summer, the museum will have a traveling exhibit titled “World of Giant Insects” that will feature animatronics insects.