SNOMNH: Paleozoic Gallery Construction

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a … a … what is that, anyway?

The latest addition in the gallery is a flock of trilobites and other kooky Cambrian creatures that drift overhead like a flock of flying bugs. Trilobites, bizarre Burgess Shale critters – including the Opabinia regalis with its bulging eyes and elephantine proboscis – and some things that look like mighty big Cambrian Crawdads. I can’t decide if they’re cute or creepy, but they are very realistic. You half expect them to wiggle their little gills and swim away.

Terry tells us the Lighting Guy will be here on Thursday, and we’re excited about this because at last we’ll be able to really see what’s going on in the gallery. So far, except for the enclosed dioramas, everything is being installed under house lights with the occasional flood light brought in. The crew sometimes works with headlamps just be able to see what their doing. Having real lighting will mean we might be able to get some really good photographs soon. Plus the lighting adds an extra dimension of drama to the exhibits, so they will look and feel more “finished,” even as the work continues.

Above: a rare photo of Terry – usually very poker-faced – smiling while he masks off an image of an Eryops in one of the murals preparatory to some detail-work. We had to tell lots of really corny one-liners to get this out of him. He’s crunchy on the outside, but he’s really pretty chewy on the inside. Terry and the whole Chase team are a lot of fun to work with, and seem to thoroughly enjoy the rare and wonderful work that they do.

Yesterday’s peek into the gallery brought fresh surprises. For one thing, a gigantic Anomalocaris now looms over the Cambrian area. Anomalocaris was the Top Predator among the weird critters discovered in the Burgess Shale, and this supersized version certainly gives you a sense of how truly threatening and dangerous it was. Seeing its enormous hairy pincers from a prey’s eye view makes you glad you live in the Cenozoic.

There are lots of other new models being installed, or waiting to be installed. We saw crates full of trilobites the size of sleds – their spiny bug-like legs sticking up through their protective wrappings. There are more strange animals from the Burgess shale, including a pair of big, irridescent jellyfish models we saw being installed overhead.

There is evidence of rock builders at work, creating rock walls out of foam, putty and paint. But the big project now underway is the forest.

A canopy of piney limbs now hangs over the area destined to become the Pennsylvanian coal swamp forest. Crew member Jessica Westen explains that these are just filler – a crosshatching of greenery to provide depth. The actual branches that will hang below them will be installed later. Today Jessica is building trees.

Actually, she’s building calamites. They look more like giant, horsetail ferns than anything you would call a “tree,” though at 8 feet tall or so, they seem hardly to qualify as “ferns.” The process involves selecting from an assortment of green tufted wire branches that were pre-fabricated in Chase’s studio. Jessica arranges these and then and attaches each of them to the jointed trunk individually. There are dozens of limbs for each tree, and four large trees, plus many smaller ones – 4 feet tall or so. Jessica has her work cut out for her.

She works amid a woodsy jumble of piled-up fabricated fern branches, artificial Christmas tree limbs (the “filler” in the canopy I mentioned before), and several large tree trunks, wrapped in plastic, lying around like shrink-wrapped logs. These will be placed strategically to support the overhead canopy and to mask pillars and corners of the diorama. Terry Chase points out one with prickly, scaled bark like a fierce pine cone. There are lots more plants coming, he promises. These are just what would fit on the truck for this visit.

I asked him about what appear to be several bundles of sticks. Terry tugs some from the bundle to reveal that they are folded-up lengths of wire wrapped in dark brown paper and plastic that will later be twisted into vines.

He explains to me that this section will be full of animal models that have not arrived yet, with the exception of one friendly-looking Eryops that seems to be mildly watching all the hubbub.

“There are lots of animals in this, lots of big bugs, including giant cockroaches,” Terry says. He unwraps a sheet of tissue paper to reveal, yes, a horrifyingly realistic model of a cockroach longer than your hand. He tells me he took it into the café yesterday and put it in his salad as a joke for the café staff. If I’d found that in my salad, you’d have to call 911.

Part of the crew is hanging more murals today. Two big sections of foggy swamp are already installed, and they are using a roller with a ten-foot handle to apply glue for the next strip. Terry tells me that more trees and canopy will be installed here, as well, creating a much larger section of forest than I realized. Mirrors placed at strategic points will increase the illusion of depth. Already there is a sense of being completely surrounded, and the plants aren’t even installed yet.

While one crew is hanging fresh murals on one wall, Andrew is working with his pallette and a fine brush to paint out the edges of the murals installed earlier in the week. There are small gaps where one strip of mural meets the next. Andrew’s task is to make these disappear. He jokes about how ironic it is that as an artist, his goal is for his painting to go completely unnoticed. He points out where he has already completed the work on another mural across the way. It’s invisible. He’s good.

Wow.  What a difference a couple of weeks makes!

Those of you who are familiar with the museum’s Hall of Ancient Life are aware that the gallery has never really had an official “entrance.”  Though the exhibits are arranged in chronological order, while the Paleozoic exhibits were in a Temporary State (since the museum’s opening in 2000), visitors had to find their way to the back of the gallery in order to view them in the right order.  Most visitors probably entered the gallery at the Cenozoic (Ice Age) exhibits and went through backward.

Well, yesterday’s tour of the work in progress revealed a new entryway to the Hall of Ancient Life that will change all that.

The crew was working on a terrific, eye-catching entrance to the new Paleozoic gallery that will definitely draw visitors into the exhibits and get them started on their walk through time.  Huge models flank either side of the entrance,  including the six-foot sea scorpion mentioned earlier, as well as an ammonite, an early reptile and ancient plants.  There’s even a fleshed-out model of Deinonychus that turns its head to watch you as you walk in below it!

We spoke with Andrew Jumonville, a fabricator from Chase who was working inside a dimly lit wall niche, laying the ground matrix for a diorama of an underwater scene.  He explained to us that when they build dioramas, one of the first things to go in is the lighting.  That way, the rest of the scene can be assembled using the light in which it will ultimately be viewed.  Because the color and brightness of the lights can have dramatic effects on the way colors appear in the diorama, he has to build the scene to suit the light.  What looks blue in white light might look green in the dim, bluish light of the diorama.

Andrew laid on layers of putty to build up the “ocean” floor, working to blend it in as seamlessly as possible with the mural at the back of the diorama.  The color of the putty has to match the color on the mural, and sometimes he has to touch up paint to compensate for unwanted shadows.

“It’s the ultimate trompe l’oeil,” he explained.  “If you looked at these under regular light, or photographed them with a flash, you would get strange spots where we’ve covered shadows in the diorama.”

In  the Permian area, Jessica Western, another Chase fabricator, is up to her elbows in a bucket of dirt-colored goop.  She is spreading layers of what looks like spackling putty over a chicken-wire framework around the base of a skeleton, building up the ground form.  Behind her, in a row of empty cases, are no fewer than four different types of sharks– fully fleshed models, actually – lying in a row, waiting for installation.

There are more new models, also… things I didn’t expect to see.  There’s an octopus.  An octopus?  There’s an entire cart full of prickly-looking sea creatures and sea grass that looks like it’s caught in a breeze, all bending one way.  There’s a four-foot tall pink, corally thing that twists like a giant prickly corn dog.

We peer into one of the nearly-complete dioramas where a host of tiny models have been placed with intense care and artistry in their make-believe world. I asked if there is a drawing or plan for how these things are placed, or if they just grab a tray of models and wing it.

“The only plan is in Terry’s head,” Andrew laughs.  Terry Chase is owner of Chase Studio.  “We know what specimens have to go in.  Terry has an idea of what he wants.  Otherwise it’s very organic. When you do a drawing, it’s straight on – two dimensional.  But with these, what looks good from one angle might not look right from another, so we have to look at things in a lot of different ways and keep adjusting.”

The final results are breathtaking.

This morning we had the pleasure of giving a tour through the new gallery space to Oklahoma’s First Lady Kim Henry.

It’s always fun to show off your new toys, and we were all very pleased that the First Lady had requested a tour of the museum and the new gallery.  Our director, Ellen Censky, gave her a personal tour and explained how the gallery will flesh out.

It is a pleasure to tour someone that shows such genuine interest in the museum, and fascination with the science behind the exhibits.  As a former teacher, Mrs. Henry was particularly interested in the museum’s educational mission, and spent nearly as much time exploring the classrooms as the exhibits area.

Mrs. Henry was accompanied by Reggie Whitten and Robert Newman, co-founders of the Whitten-Newman Foundation, which recently made a gift to the museum to fund ExplorOlogy, an educational program for children.

The team from Chase is back today and they have presents! The space is filled with bubble-wrapped critters, trees and plants. This morning they are still installing cabinetry and running conduit for electrical, but later this week they will begin putting some of these new exhibit elements into place.

We poked around with a camera, exploring all the intriguing bundles and packages that have been unloaded. There is an open crate filled with giant dragonflies. A strip of sheer plastic shrouds a whole tray of trilobites and crinoids. A large cross-section of an ammonite is just visible through its plastic wrappings. The distinctive shape of a six-foot-long shark is discernable through its bubble-wrap.

The Chase team finally took pity on our curiosity and generously took a few minutes out to unwrap some things for us to see.

A greatly enlarged model of a Eurypterid, or sea scorpion, is unpacked. At its natural size of six or eight inches, the living creature would have looked strange enough. It looks like a cross between a giant silverfish and a crab, with clawed appendages out front and jointed spidery legs poking out from underneath. At this size, (about six feet in length), this one looks like something that scuttled out from under the bathroom sink of your nightmares. I’m a bit dismayed to learn from invertebrate paleontology curator Steve Westrop that some Eurypterids actually achieved this monstrous size.

A heavily bundled package marked “Fragile” is unwrapped to reveal a beautiful model of an Archaeopteryx, the first bird. The artist has painted its feathered tail and wings in jewel tones of purple and blue, so that it resembles a predatory parrot with a wise lizard’s face.

We pass covered boxes full of plant stems that look like horsetail ferns and disembodied conifer branches that will eventually become trees for the exhibit’s coal swamp forest diorama. It is amazing how many pieces there are to be assembled. We look forward to watching the process as the week progresses.

On St. Patrick’s Day our tour reveals a Really Big Fish installed in one of the dioramas. This is a life-sized Dunkleosteus that appears to be diving down into an aquarium at eye level. Its intended prey, a not-so-small shark, will be installed later.

I’m sure that visitors who have seen the cast skull of a Dunkleosteus in the museum’s current exhibits have wondered what that monstrous creature would have looked like in life. In a word: fierce.

The Permian murals are complete now as well. Look closely. These are not trees you have ever seen before…

Construction is now well under way for the new Paleozoic gallery. After months of the less-than-exciting work of wall construction, drywall installation and electrical work, now at last we begin to see the gallery take shape.The space has been completely transformed. What was once a wide-open area has now become a course of twists and turns, with more to discover around every corner. Intriguing openings in the walls have bloomed colorful murals inside, hinting at the exhibits to come.One of the most dramatic changes was the installation of the huge mural on the wall behind what will become the Permian diorama. Chase fabricators used the scissor-lift to install the murals like giant strips of wallpaper. A small crowd of museum staff and volunteers congregated at the Ancient Life overlook in the Natural Wonders gallery to watch the process. This has become a favorite vantage point for stealing sneek peeks into the construction zone.The fabrication crew from Chase Studio spends alternate weeks fabricating exhibit components in their labs in Missouri and installing them here at the museum. Each week when they arrive, they bring something new.Trees trunks and stromatolites, wrapped in cellophane, are laid out on the floor waiting to being installed, and our first quick tour revealed this little group of critter models, the first we’ve seen.It’s exciting to be offering fleshed-out models for the first time in the Ancient Life gallery. Though viewing the massive skeletons of dinosaurs certainly feeds the imagination, there is something to be said for being offered a scientific interpretation of what the animals would have looked like in life.