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CALIFORNIA WILD

Here at the academy

New Homes for the Academy's Bones

Hugh Powell

When a giant flaming meteorite crashed into Mexico 65 million years ago, it spelled the end of the age of dinosaurs. Or, from another perspective, it kicked off the age of dinosaur recycling. After all, plenty of visitors still burn the goopy remains of that long-lost world getting to and from the Academy.

The Academy has embraced this tradition of reuse during its move to downtown San Franciso. It has donated many of its exhibits to other institutions throughout California and recycled most of its former buildings while it awaits completion of a new building in Golden Gate Park.

Displays in the new building will include walk-through rainforests and a living coral reef in a tank 20 feet deep. To make room, most old exhibits have been retired, including “Life Through Time” and “Wild California.” Rather than let these items fade away behind the scenes, Jean DeMouthe, senior collections manager for the Invertebrate Zoology and Geology department, and Judy Prokupek, a senior advisor for the move, helped find them new homes at learning institutions around California.

Under their guidance, a model of a giant pterosaur found its way to Humboldt State University, and bone casts of five Mesozoic giants now occupy Science Hall at City College of San Francisco. Earthquake exhibit shake tables went to the Josephine Randall Museum across town; the bones of the Camptosaurus dinosaur journeyed south to Riverside’s Jurupa Mountain Cultural Center; and at the arboretum of the University of California, Santa Cruz, two boulders of California jade now grace a grassy hillside.

All the old Academy buildings have been leveled except for two walls from African Hall, which will serve as a link to the past. More than 80 percent of the nearly 25,000 tons of demolished material has been recycled. The walls were crushed into rubble—including, sadly, many of African Hall’s exquisite diorama backgrounds, which had been painted directly onto concrete. The debris was used in a roadbed for a highway project in Richmond.

Humboldt State University’s natural history museum took in many of the old exhibits. DeMouthe asked museum director Melissa Zielinski to make a wish list of her favorite items. Zielinski didn’t get item number one on her list—the gray whale that used to hang from the ceiling—but says the pterosaur and shark models thrilled her. “I thought there was no way I was ever going to get these. It was like Christmas.”

At their new home in Arcata, the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus spreads its 18-foot wings beneath the museum’s redwood-beam ceiling, above a replica of a giant Ultrasaurus leg. And the great white shark model that once lurked in Cowell Hall bares teeth by the dozen overhead. The 17-foot-long shark never fails to make visitors shiver, Zielinski says. “One of the comments in the guest book said, ‘I will never go into the ocean again.”

Many specimens and exhibit panels from “Life Through Time” found their way to City College of San Francisco, where Katryn Wiese, a geology instructor and one-time Academy docent, is planning a “Story of Time and Life” exhibit in the college’s Science Hall.

The exhibit kicks off on the ground floor with a fossil gallery featuring casts of real specimen bones such as the sail-backed dimetrodon; a plesiosaur; a theropod dinosaur related to the crafty velociraptors of Jurassic Park; and a 25-foot-long fish, all from the Academy. Wiese’s exhibit will then head into the Big Bang, and wind upward through the building and through evolutionary time. Humans will make their first appearance, Wiese says, “in the last little corner of the third floor.”

Wiese is still looking for funding to complete the exhibit. (She moved most of the exhibit panels to City College in the back of her Nissan Pathfinder.) In the meantime, the dimetrodon guards a campus building lobby, while a plesiosaur swims across 30 feet of wall in the earth sciences laboratory.

City College will also be home to Robert Howard’s whale fountain sculpture, which once greeted visitors in the Academy’s central courtyard. After needed repairs, the two dancing whales will take up residence on campus, where they will be featured in a walking tour of campus art.

The whales first appeared in public at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair on Treasure Island. At City College they will rejoin other works of art that were originally displayed at the exposition, including murals by Herman Volz, sculpture by Frederick Olmsted, and a mural by Diego Rivera.

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 180 million years before they gave way to the age of mammals. The old Academy building’s reign was somewhat shorter, clocking in at just over 80 years. But unlike the dinosaurs, by 2008 the Academy will be back in Golden Gate Park, ready to greet the coming years with a mixture of brand-new exhibits and its treasures from the past.

Former scientist Hugh Powell has recently been recycled into a science writer.