CARIBOU — For the month of May in this celebratory year of the city’s beginning, the Nylander Museum has a rather unique combined offering, according to Jeanie McGowan, director of the Nylander Museum of Natural History.
Contributed photo
Noah Heidorn of Caribou gives his own Tyrannosaurus rex impersonation inside the jaws of the Black Beauty exhibit at the Nylander Museum.
In honor of Caribou’s 150 anniversary, a beautiful hand-made quilt honoring Caribou women is on display in the Nylander’s main lobby until June. The quilt has been on display in a variety of other sites in and around the city, and will continue its tour of several more sites before the end of the sesquicentennial year. An historic work of art in its own right, the quilt was created by nine regional members of the Crown of Maine Quilters group and consists of 30 individual “personality” squares that pay homage to a specific woman per square who has been the first in her field in Caribou, ranging from the first woman settler from Canada in 1834 to present-day women like Senator Susan Collins and Recreation Department director Kathy Mazzuchelli.
In addition to celebrating women of Caribou, the natural history museum also celebrates the dinosaur discovery path that began 150 years ago when early paleontologists began to uncover dinosaurs—extinct for approximately 66 million years.
According to McGowan, the dinosaur craze began and continues to this day to occupy the minds of both children and adults with mysteries of the Earth’s history. Today, most elementary school children can speak Latin—or at least rattle off two rather strange Latin words—Tyrannosaurus rex, meaning “king of the tyrant lizards.”
One specific king (“or perhaps we should say princess,” said McGowan), was a T. rex skeleton named Black Beauty, found in Crowsnest Pass in Alberta, Canada in 1981 by Boy Scouts. Black Beauty, a female T. rex, was so named because her fossilized bones were preserved in a Cretaceous formation with a high manganese content—lending the black color to her entire skeleton. She was a teenage “tyrant lizard” and the most complete skeleton of her species discovered at the time—first in her field in Alberta.
A life-sized replica of Black Beauty’s skull now sits in the Nylander lobby on a mount that holds it up off the floor so children can peer into her large toothy jaws; the original in the Tyrrell Museum in Alberta. The replica skull is on loan to the Nylander from Tony Sohns, a well-known science educator from Bangor and co-owner of the family owned and operated Rock & Art Shop in Ellsworth. www.therockandartshop.com Mr. Sohns is known as “the bug man” specializing in entomology, but offers other natural history education programs for schools and groups.
“Tony offered the Black Beauty skull to the Nylander for a greatly reduced fee, and I was delighted to be able to bring this unique offering to the museum,” said McGowan. “There are very few—if any—other dinosaur programs in the state of Maine, so this is an unique opportunity for visitors to actually see the juvenile T. rex skull’s enormous size and learn a bit about these incredible creatures,” she added. “Tony also brought a few extras with him—a large piece of dinosaur dung called a coprolite and a dinosaur bone segment exhibiting the bone’s crosscut view. The Nylander has in its permanent collection replicas of a Protoceratops egg, a Dimetrodon skeleton; as well as a Pleistocene kangaroo jaw.”
The Nylander has a strong connection to the Northern Maine Museum of Science at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, housing the UMPI’s fossils traveling trunk full of many animal and plant fossils, but according to McGowan, none are as exciting as seeing this life-sized Black Beauty skull. Children are encouraged to touch Black Beauty and the other fossils—a once in a lifetime experience, because most museums are hands-off. Some recent visitors to the Nylander have even peered into her mouth and placed their heads inside her huge jaws for a photo opportunity.”
Not only does the Nylander exhibit Black Beauty and our other specimens; also on display are two large dinosaur footprint fossils, a huge fossilized tibia (lower leg bone) from a duck-billed Hadrosaur dinosaur and a partially complete Triceratops skull, both still in the shipping crates from the Museum of Rockies in Montana—gifts to UMPI from the famed dinosaur hunter Jack Horner.”
Black Beauty’s smooth, black, resin skull cast is interspersed with rough gray sections representing the “open” spaces of the original skull that accommodated her ear canal, eye sockets, and nasal passages. Sohns says that a sneeze from the live Beauty 66 million years ago (if dinosaurs sneezed) would have yielded gallons of mucus, determined by the large size of the nasal cavity.
The Nylander gift shop has many dinosaur items on sale from large laminated posters to dinosaur jewelry, inflatable dinosaurs, toys, and activity books. In honor of the Black Beauty exhibit, visitors can fill out tickets at the museum’s sign-in book for a May 28 4p.m. drawing for three wonderful dinosaur prizes.
The Nylander is currently on its winter schedule and open only on Wednesdays from 9-5. On May 20, there will be an all-day, on-going clay-play activity and on May 27, a lecture on the end of the dinosaurs at 3:30p.m. The museum will begin its summer hours on May 28, opening at 12:30 and closing at 4:30pm. The Black Beauty exhibit will close on May 28.
For more information, call the Nylander at 493-4209 Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
Contributed photo
Abrianna Rydell, of Caribou, pets the skull of a teenage female Tyrannosaurus rex called Black Beauty in the lobby of the Nylander Museum.
