World famous for discovering enough weird, spectacular, fossilized animals to fill a museum, University of Chicago dinosaur hunter Paul Sereno is looking to do just that–give his beasts a permanent home in his own world-class exhibition hall.
What Sereno, 44, and his educator wife, Gabrielle Lyon, 29, have in mind is a $15 million to $20 million edifice that would be part museum, part botanical conservatory, part laboratory and part classroom.
The institution would be different from the city’s science museums, Sereno and Lyon say, in that one of its primary missions would be to inspire minority and female students in middle school and high school to pursue careers in science.
Drawings of the proposed building show a big glass-walled pavilion with a parklike interior. There the couple want to place Sereno’s spectacular fossil menagerie of fierce carnivores and monster plant eaters among lush, living plants.
The museum also would showcase new findings by Chicago scientists in subjects ranging from physics and biology to astronomy.
“Whether we do this in our own building or we become a wing of an established institution like the Museum of Science and Industry or the Field Museum, it doesn’t matter,” Sereno said.
“It’s important that we have facility like this in the city, preferably on the South Side or the West Side. We need to reach kids who aren’t very well represented in the ranks of scientists, like blacks, Hispanics and, especially, females.”
If any other scientists in Chicago dared to vocalize such a dream, particularly in a recession, they’d almost certainly be politely ignored.
Sereno, however, has the sort of stature and charisma that makes people listen. Important people. He is a hometown kid who stayed home and managed–by dint of brilliant work–to become perhaps the world’s most renowned paleontologist.
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“There are a lot of people who would love to see this happen, to see Paul’s and Gabe’s dream become a reality,” said Donna LaPietra, one of the city’s most prominent philanthropic supporters of cultural institutions.
The couple are forming a board of directors for such an institution and have impressed a number of potential private, corporate and foundation donors as well as key city officials, she said.
Mayor Richard Daley said Friday he supported the museum idea but stopped short of promising city financial aid.
“We are working with him and many people who support him trying to find him the right home, the right facility,” Daley said. Whether that turns out to be a new stand-alone museum, a special place in an existing museum or some other option remains to be seen, he said.
Garfield Park exhibit
Sereno and Lyon are preparing an exhibit scheduled to open this fall at the Garfield Park Conservatory that they say incorporates some of their ideas for the proposed museum. Many of Sereno’s dinosaur skeleton casts will be taken out of storage and placed among the conservatory’s flourishing ancient shrub and tree species.
“There’s something absolutely mesmerizing,” said Sereno, “about putting the animals into that setting. Magnolias, ginkgos and cycads, they were all around back then, when the asteroid hit. The dinosaurs would have seen the first flowering trees.”
He and Lyon have a 4,000-square-foot exhibit, “The Science of SuperCroc,” running through May 27 at the Museum of Science and Industry, that features a 40-foot crocodile skeleton, Sarchosuchus, that lived 110 million years ago.
Educational adventure
Sereno also created a permanent exhibit at the Chicago Children’s Museum at Navy Pier, where preschoolers and grammar school tykes can look for simulated bones in an enormous sandbox “dig pit.” But Sereno designed the pit with features so he can bring in high school and college students and teach them sophisticated excavation concepts.
In the past few years the couple have designed temporary exhibits that have appeared or are running at museums in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Tokyo and Sydney, including “Dinosaur Giants,” a millennial extravaganza in 2000 at Navy Pier that drew more than half a million visitors. They also have put up permanent museum installations in Niamey, Niger, and Casablanca, Morocco.
The animals that populate these exhibits are drawn from storage in Chicago, where the couple keep a number of casts of the many fossil creatures Sereno has excavated.
Sereno has tons of unexamined fossils in his university lab, still in the plaster “field jackets” his expedition crews used to protect them as they came out of the ground.
“We have enough fossils in field jackets to keep us going with new discoveries for years without having to do another expedition,” said Sereno, who continues to mount new expeditions. “We brought back 50,000 pounds of material last year [from Africa]. We have material from China, India and Africa we haven’t worked with yet.”
Probably no paleontologist can match the number of major discoveries Sereno has made in the last 15 years. Beyond his obvious scientific zeal, he is a bit of a ham and a showboat, as many great teachers are.
Global recognition
Those are the qualities the National Geographic Society, one of the main sponsors of his scientific work, recognized years ago. Through his stories in the society’s magazine, and even more so through television shows documenting the derring-do and drama of his foreign expeditions, his boyish good looks and enthusiasm are recognized globally.
About 10 years ago, Sereno began to put his growing fame to work, using it as an entree to take his dinosaur bones into schools in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, hoping to spark an interest in science.
With Lyon, whom he married in 1996, Sereno started a non-profit organization called Project Exploration in 1999 to further pursue that goal. It now operates with a small staff and an annual budget of more than $500,000 out of offices in Hyde Park.
For the last four years, they and some of Sereno’s graduate students have been teaching a couple of dozen city students the rudiments of field work in after-school and weekend sessions to take them to work at actual dig sites in Texas, Montana and Wyoming.
Last year the students recovered a fossil of a big meat eater they first thought was a Tyrannosaurus rex. But as preparators bring the bone out of the surrounding rock in Sereno’s lab, it appears to be something even better.
“It is definitely a tyrannosaurid,” said Sereno, “but it is too mature and too small to be a Tyrannosaurus rex. It appears to be a new species, a great treasure. It was an incredible thrill to dig this out with these kids. Some of the kids are helping now with the preparation of the fossil.”
Marco Mendez, 16, a junior at Noble Street Charter High School, has been in Project Exploration since he was recruited shortly before Sereno took a dozen kids by bus to a dig in Big Bend National Park in Texas three years ago.
His grades were so-so, he said, and he had no specific plans for college, but took the trip because it was his first chance to get out of the city.
“Let me tell you, it was a heck of a trip,” he said. “I didn’t know who Paul Sereno was, just that he was a teacher. The bus broke down and we got lost in the desert. It was fun.
“This was the first time for some of us to see stars, rock formations, wildlife. Of any science that I was interested in up to then, it was mostly astronomy, but then I found sharks’ teeth in the desert, and I have been working ever since to be a paleontologist.”
He now has an “A” average, he said, and is aiming to get into Harvard, Yale or Dartmouth.
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Sereno and Lyon would like to enlarge on such work by getting other scientists to follow their lead at the proposed museum.
Scientific harmony
They said they expect little conflict with the city’s other science museums–Science and Industry, the Field and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum–because of their specialized educational mission.
“The Field Museum has its own, highly respected plans for its dinosaurs,” said Sereno. “I have one of my animals in their collection, Herrerasaurus, and I am a research associate there. Many of our board members are board members at the Field too.
“We’re both doing valuable things with dinosaurs, but different things. They are a museum, and Gabe and I want to build a science center.”
David Mosena, president of the Museum of Science and Industry, said he isn’t familiar enough with the couple’s plans for a building to talk about it.
“Could we be one of the places they might consider as a home for their work? We would like to talk to them about it, certainly,” Mosena said. “Paul Sereno is one of the finest, most exciting young scientists in the country. Gabrielle is a great educator and manager, and their use of high school students is terrific.”