ON THE MAP
ON THE MAP; Animal Heads and Bugs Poised to Spring From the Storeroom
By KAREN DeMASTERS
Published: August 22, 1999
In a storage area at the Newark Museum, heads of antelopes, water buffalo and moose line the walls and row upon row of filing cabinets and shelves hold thousands of insects and other small examples of animal life. Minerals and fossils of all sizes are laid out neatly on tables.
The 2,000 square feet of storage houses what will soon become a natural science exhibition and research facility that will augment the museum's extensive art and history exhibits. The animals have been in storage for the past 12 years, since the old natural science section of the museum was dismantled.
Ismael Calderon, the museum's science director, left the American Museum of Natural History in New York City more than two years ago to oversee the revival of the natural science department. Dr. Calderon recently talked about his plans.
Q. How did the collection come into existence?
A. The natural science department was started in about 1929. The foundation for the collection was donated by Dr. William J. Disbrow, a Newark physician who had a collection of 74,000 precious stones, plants and seeds. Then over the years the curators added to the collection so that people could study the natural processes that formed this area and other areas around the world. Today, that is still the mission of the museum and we have acquired even more exhibits. A lion, which is a superb specimen of a one-year-old male, was donated to us by someone who killed it in Africa in the early 1970's when it was still legal to do that.
Q. Are there items here that are native to New Jersey?
A. We have a large number of specimens of animals, minerals and fossils native to New Jersey. In the natural science exhibit, which will be called Making Sense of the Natural World and is scheduled to open in 2001, we will have a cave that will have Franklin minerals in it. These are fluorescent minerals, calcite and willemite, found in the New Jersey highlands near Franklin. We will have fossils of fish, amphibians and reptiles from the area. We also have dinosaur skeletons found in New Jersey.
Q. How do you keep track of what is in the collection?
A. People think of a museum as a big collection of things piled in a room. That is not the way it is. Everything is carefully stored and until recently every known detail about an exhibit was recorded in a file cabinet, like a card catalogue in a library. Now it is all being transferred to a computer.
If someone wants to come in an examine a particular type of rock from a particular era, we can find it on the computer and know exactly which drawer to look in. You don't have to handle a lot of different specimens looking for the one you want and risk damaging the specimen.
Q. How is the natural science center being developed?
A. We have two prototypes. One is open to the public now, the other is set to open next month. We have exhibits in them in which we are trying a number of different things to see what is most effective. We want children and adults to be able to interact with the exhibits and we want our explanations to draw people in and actually tell them how things came to be and how they are connected. We don't want a lot of dry explanations that no one will read or things that people look at for a few seconds and not know what they are seeing. We will take the things from the prototypes that work and incorporate them in the new 5,000-square-foot exhibition. No museum has ever developed an exhibition in this way before. KAREN DeMASTERS
Photo: Ismael Calderon and a stuffed lion that will be part of a natural science section at the Newark Museum. (Frank C. Dougherty for The New York Times)