Natural History Exhibit Covers One Million Years

Story and Photography Courtesy
of South Carolina Natural History Museum

any early museums, some dating back to the late 1600s, originated from gifts of private collections. At first, most exhibits consisted of classified and labeled geological or biological specimens. Later exhibition techniques have emphasized the grouping of specimens to illustrate origins, associations, and interrelationships. Exhibition devices include habitat groups, restorations, murals, dioramas, models, and key installations in feature exhibits.

Time will tell and from its beginnings in prehistoric times to the 20th century, natural history and science, on the simplest level, is knowledge of the world of nature. The uncovering of the first bone or the finding of the first piece of pottery, were reasons enough for institutions or buildings to be built where collections relevant to science and history could be preserved and displayed.

The modern museum has a threefold function—exhibition of collections, sponsoring of research, and education. Many museums provide cataloged reserve collections for students and undertake research and the publication of results; some participate in expeditions for research or for enlarging collections. Provisions for adult education include guided tours, lectures, and classes; museums cooperate with schools by providing loan exhibitions, special exhibits and tours for children, and story hours. A growing trend has been the use of computer terminals and “hands-on” models to enhance the learning experience. Many museums now also attempt to educate the public in the principles of ecology, wildlife and resource conservation.

Hundreds of specimens from South Carolina’s natural world of today and yesterday comprise the South Carolina State Museum’s major new natural history exhibit.

Opening Sept. 8, 2006 and running through September 10, 2007, Carolina Natural features portions of the museum’s natural history collection that either have never been exhibited before or haven’t been exhibited in many years.

“Over the past years, the collection has grown exponentially,” says Director of Collections and Chief Curator of Natural History Jim Knight. “It will involve both fossils and recent materials.” These materials will include collections of bird eggs, beetles and dragonflies, as well as much bigger items such as recent whale bones. Also included are taxidermied specimens of birds and mammals, some as large as whitetail and mule deer, both of which will be included so people can see the differences,” says Knight.

“In addition to a host of other fossil specimens such as sea shells, trilobites, fossil plants, and lots of vertebrate fossils, the exhibit will feature a number of whale, snake and mammal fossils,” Knight says.
One of the exhibit’s most exciting new features is a 450,000-year-old skull of the vicious sabertooth cat, Smilodon fatalis, often incorrectly called a sabertooth tiger, the curator says.

The skull is one of six discovered in a limestone quarry near Harleyville and represents a rare find in that “it is the only group of saber cats that were alive at the same time and the same place, so we’ve been able to sample that particular population, which will provide us with extremely important information,” says Knight.

Knight dubbed the dig site “Camelot” because there also were a lot of prehistoric camel bones found there, along with the fossils of species from ancient deer to turtles to large ground sloths.

The site yielded literally thousands of bones between 400,000 and 450,000 years old, many of which will be shown in the new exhibit.

Knight is humble when comparing the collection with some of the big names of older institutions. “We’re a young museum with a relatively small collection compared to places like the Smithsonian and Harvard. We have an impressive collection for our youth, but it’s tiny, the germ of a collection.”

Others aren’t quite so shy about their impressions of the State Museum’s holdings, however.

Thanks largely to the abundance of material from the Camelot site, the museum’s growing fossil collection has been called one of the nation’s top 25 vertebrate paleontology collections by a leading expert at the University of Kansas. Regardless of the praise of professionals, it’s the museum’s guests whom Knight is most anxious to impress - and inform.

“I want everyone who sees this exhibit to gain a sense of awe at how different South Carolina has been in the past than it is today, and get a sense of the tremendously diverse species that have lived in our state.”

Carolina Natural can be seen in the fourth-floor Palmetto Gallery - 803-898-4948.