San Diego Natural History Museum 150th anniversary events:
Big Birthday Block Party: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19. Free.
Paleo Center member sneak preview: 5-7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 8. Free for members.
1788 El Prado, Balboa Park.
How does paleontology fit in a fall arts guide? The San Diego Natural History Museum (the Nat) is celebrating its 150th anniversary in Balboa Park — a cultural institution in a cultural hub. SDNHM paleontologist Christopher Plouffe says that paleontologists are caretakers and historians — and that the best part is sharing this work with kids and adults alike.
"My motto is visibility is power," Plouffe said of the museum's glass paleontology lab and demonstration studio. "It is important that we are showcasing not only what we do, but why we do it."
Natural history and science museums are often a young person's first museum or cultural experience — maybe a sort of gateway to other museums. Plouffe, the paleontology lab manager at SDNHM, spoke to KPBS about his work, his favorite fossils and what the next 150 years might hold for paleontology and the museum.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Let's start with what you do. You're the lab manager and you somehow have to work with fossils and volunteers and visitors. Can you talk a little bit about what the paleontology lab handles?
Christopher Plouffe: On a day-to-day basis, it's different. So it kind of is unique in that sense. Most of the time I am there supporting the volunteers and other staff members in the fossil preparation of these specimens that are coming from the field. I do some education and outreach in our lab window — we have a demonstration space where I'm able to engage with the public.
So, this window is like in the museum, people can walk up as they're strolling through the museum and see a lab at work, correct?
Plouffe: Yes. It's a floor to ceiling glass window that opens and what is fascinating about it and what I really enjoy doing is having it closed but unlocked and asking the visitor to open it themselves so they can break that fourth wall and then we can begin engagement. So not only the visual but we can now have a conversation about what I'm doing, why I'm doing it.
Tell me how you got into paleontology.
Plouffe: My talk about this is I was a pre-med major in college and I was moving into the more advanced coursework — physical chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry — and it just wasn't settling right. It wasn't my passion. It wasn't something that I was on a wavelength or vibrating with, so I took a one unit weekend geology field trip to the high desert, and that one weekend of classwork was so enlightening. It just encouraged me to take the introduction to geology class and then it just kind of spiraled from there into paleontology. With such a heavy chemistry and biology background, it was kind of the avenue to my future.
How long have you been at the San Diego Natural History Museum?
Plouffe: I've been working for the museum for 20 years.
Wow. If you could give one piece of advice to a young person who is seriously considering going into this field, what would you tell them?
Plouffe: I would tell them research, collecting data — paleontology isn't just dinosaurs. There's a spectrum of work in this field and it's important for you to find what you're passionate about. And then read up on that topic and on that subject and kind of have a background in that.
Okay. I'm anxious to talk about some of the things you brought with you today. A little fossil show-and-tell. Can you maybe walk us through what it means to prepare a fossil specimen and describe what we're looking at here.
Plouffe: Well, I'm gonna talk about the process really quick and then we'll move on to the specimens and how they exemplify that. When we find a fossil in the field, it's important for us to delineate where that fossil is. Are there additional fossils? What is the spatial distribution of these fossils? So context of fossil collecting is very important. It's not just that fossil, it's the sediment that it comes in. It is the placement. I like to refer to this as a crime scene investigation of sorts.
The fossil has been gently cradled and hugged in these sediments for thousands, if not millions of years. So it's important for us to remove it with that sediment without disturbing the fossil. It could potentially destabilize it, and it is our job to stabilize and protect it.
We have a specimen here that is a brontothere shoulder blade. It's been prepared completely. Something that's really neat about this specimen is that there's two bite marks on it, from what appears to be the canines, so this could have been some sort of feline that took a bite of the shoulder blade, perhaps it was a scavenger like eating the meat because muscles will attach to these larger bones.
This cradle enables us to flip the specimen back and forth. So I make the first side of the cradle in the jacket and then I will flip the specimen into the cradle and then prepare what is then the surface side originally. And once that's clean, I'll create a cradle for that and we're able to flip the specimen back and forth and see both sides.
So it's almost like a little case that it lives in.
Plouffe: Yeah.
And this shoulder blade is huge, right? How big is this animal, do you think?
Plouffe: Relatively speaking, it's big, yes. So this animal is ancestral rhinoceros. But don't think full size. And again it's 40 million years old, so I can't really call it a rhinoceros. I'm just trying to paint a picture so you can kind of feel the size. This looks sub-adult to myself. They do get a lot bigger than this.
The shoulder blade of this brontothere is about the size of the head of an oar, the part that would go into the water. So it's very flat and there are some ridges on it for muscle attachment.
And where did that come from?
Plouffe: This came from Carlsbad. Well this, the first specimen in the jacket, is Ice Age. So it's not that old, relatively speaking. Deep time is … deep time. That other specimen is 40 million years old, and here in San Diego, we have a wonderful collection from this time period of these really early mammals. And Mother Nature was running wild with her evolution and adaptation of specimens. So we really see some really cool early fauna there.
Do you have a favorite story, a favorite fossil that you have worked on in your career?
Plouffe: I did three field seasons with the LA County Natural History Museum, and we went out to ecological Montana to dig up a T-Rex. And it's really special when you're doing field work, you know, you're out in the dirt and you have to do the site map, and you have to collect the specimens, and then this idea of transporting back to Los Angeles. Just six weeks each summer camping and then coming back into civilization after that stint is just kind of wild, when you're just in nature for so long and you're removed from the hustle of everyday life.
So one of the things that you're passionate about is making paleontology and science more accessible. What does this look like and how do you pull it off at the museum?
Plouffe: My motto is visibility is power and it is important that we are showcasing not only what we do, but why we do it.
Being behind this glass window, doing the work that we do, the public can come and take a look. I don't necessarily have to have the window open to engage or to educate. You just have to make a sign that explains what you're doing and why you're doing it.
I find that the kids are the passionate ones about paleontology. It's this idea that everyone seems to — as a child even now some adults — gravitate towards and if I can harness that fascination and even get one little kid into pursuing that, then I've done my job.
Also, this is a field that not too many people are familiar with. There's a lot of questions. A lot of pop culture informs us about paleontology, and I want to make sure that I'm there to either correct that or to, you know, enforce and encourage it. So yeah, informing the youth is important but also informing the adults of these youth is equally as important because they're the ones that can take that torch and run with it.
So the San Diego Natural History Museum is celebrating its 150th anniversary this fall. How, do you think, can a natural history museum and institution like this move into the future, the next 150 years?
Plouffe: We have just built the new paleontology lab in the basement and we're very excited about this space. It has enabled us to bring all the specimens under one roof. We had them spread throughout not only the museum but cities here in San Diego. So having that collection all together will encourage researchers to come and we can have everything for them.
The conservation not only of paleontology, but the herpetology, entomology, all these fields, you know, the museum has been doing it for 150 years and it's important that we take this information, we move it forward. You know, we are caretakers. We're the stewards of this information. We are historians, and so we were here to record that data.
And as we see sometimes in the past history can write itself in favorable ways — we want to make sure that we are non-biased in that.
So this new space downstairs will encourage the public to take a look at the work that we do, our collections — that we are a museum of collections, that this data is vital to creating hypotheses and, you know, coming to these conclusions that we have.
Yeah, visibility is power. And so when people come into this space, they will be able to see how deep, how many specimens we have. Not only that, but how much room we have for growth, for additional specimens to collect.
This space being, again, visible behind glass encourages the guests to think: What about botany? How big is that botany department? How big is that entomology department? What are behind these doors and I feel that showing that to the public kind of furthers our ability to tell people like our mission of conservation.
Because we're a space that is now on view, we have to fill that space with people working. So I'm really excited that volunteer opportunities will be opening into the weekends. So this will be an opportunity for professionals, younger individuals to come in on the weekends and perhaps if they have that paleontology desire, they can come prep some fossils.
So how does one become a volunteer at the museum?
Plouffe: You would have to go to the website and there is a volunteer page where you fill out an application. I look for different types of backgrounds. Some people are really good with small detail work, other people are good at hammering and wielding axes. So there's a spectrum of the type of work that I do and how we prepare fossils, and I like to find people with different backgrounds that might help me in a certain way.
