A few months ago I squeezed some new color on my palette of duties. In addition to teaching, research, and directing the university’s herbarium, I accepted a position as interim director of the Conner Museum of Natural History. The Conner, like the Ownbey Herbarium, which I direct, is a university museum, and its mission encompasses support for research and teaching as well as public outreach. The Conner Museum is devoted primarily to vertebrates, and it consists of a research collection of about 70,000 specimens, a teaching collection used by university classes, and also three rooms of public exhibits.
The public exhibits are popular and visited by several thousand people each year. They are fairly traditional mounts of mammals and birds in display cases. In the past few years, my predecessor worked to make these displays more interesting and more educational. That’s an effort we need to continue. I was also intrigued by the idea of mounting special exhibits in which we could bring material from the research collection, which is not normally on public display, into view.
As part of my introduction to the collection several weeks ago, the collection manager showed me examples of the specimens. In deep storage in a basement of another building, she showed me elephant teeth that a former faculty member had collected. Each elephant tooth was larger than my large hands. An idea born was there: we would have a special exhibit on teeth.
For the past two weeks, we have intensively prepared for the exhibit “The Conner Museum Has Teeth.” Last weekend, coinciding with the university’s homecoming celebrations, we put our teeth on display. There were pharyngeal teeth from carp, a shark’s jaw with many rows of sharp-pointed teeth, and skulls ranging from beluga whale to tiger to shrew. We had a monkey that need orthodontic assistance and bear with shiny incisors and molars (or at least we had their skulls). And there were the lovely, intriguing elephant teeth. I spent Friday and Saturday at the exhibit chatting with visitors.
A slide show with audio that advertised our exhibit is available here.
* * *
Photos: Coyote skull, tiger teeth, dolphin jaws, and exhibit poster.



