SMU faculty and students, the University’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology, and the SMU Innovation Gymnasium have teamed with the nation’s new premier museum of nature and science to provide everything from dinosaurs and sea turtles to technical assistance and advice.
Fossils on loan by SMU to Dallas’s new Perot Museum of Nature and Science include those of animals from an ancient sea that once covered Dallas.
The fossils represent a slice of SMU’s scientific collaboration with the Perot Museum and its predecessor, the Dallas Museum of Natural History.
Items from SMU’s scientists include a 35-foot skeletal cast of the African dinosaur Malawisaurus (pictured above) standing sentry in the spacious glass lobby of the Perot, which opened Dec. 1 near downtown Dallas.
“The new museum building itself is an icon, but it’s also a statement by the city about taking the advances of science to the public,” said vertebrate paleontologist Louis Jacobs, an SMU earth sciences professor, who serves on the Perot Museum’s advisory board and Collections Committee.
Jacobs, who was ad interim director of the Dallas Museum of Natural History in 1999, led the team that discovered Malawisaurus in Africa. He provided the cast to the museum.
“Here at SMU we train students and create new knowledge. The museum’s mission is to take the stories of science out to the general public so they can be used,” said Jacobs. “Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum Curator of Earth Sciences, is a world-class scientist with whom we work. We have a junction between the mission, training and knowledge we have here, infused into and enhanced by what the museum does. That’s why the museum is important to SMU and that’s why SMU is important to the museum.”
Fossils on loan are from the Shuler Museum collection in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. SMU scientists provided technical expertise for exhibits and serve on the Perot Museum’s advisory committees.
Also on exhibit from SMU is a miniature unmanned autonomous helicopter designed for fighting fires that was built by students in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering.
Shuler Museum fossils can be viewed in the T. Boone Pickens Life Then and Now Hall. They include an unnamed 113 million-year-old herbivorous dinosaur discovered in 1985 at Proctor Lake southwest of Stephenville, Texas.
For perspective on that exhibit’s paleoenvironment in Texas at the time, SMU paleobotanist Bonnie Jacobs provided fossil wood, fossil cones, fossil leaves and images of microscopic pollen grains from the Shuler Museum. The fossils provided information used to create a model of an extinct tree to accompany the exhibit.