Diamonds to Dinosaurs

Watch this video to find out about the history of the Diamonds to Dinosaurs Gallery.

Transcript

Alex Bevan

My name is Alex Bevan, I am Head of  Earth and Planetary Sciences and Curator of Minerals and Meteorites.

What was involved in the development of this gallery?

Well even when I came in late 1985 to the Museum Ken McNamara and I talked about an integrated Earth Science gallery.  But it wasn’t until early 1999, by which time John Long had joined the team, that we were able to secure money to develop this gallery.  And so the gallery was completed in late 1999. And really it’s a gallery of evolution. That’s the way we came at it. Evolution, origin of the elements, nucleosynthesis, origin and evolution of the Solar System, building of planet Earth, what the Earth is made of - a planet of minerals – the origin of life – to which there is no answer yet  - and the subsequent evolution of life on Earth.

Professor John Long

My name is Professor John Long, from Flinders University, and I was Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Western Australian Museum between 1989 and 2004. My role was the creation of the vertebrate content of the gallery, providing specimens and information, and also we supplied a lot of the images as well.

What was your role in developing this gallery?

So my role, looking at the origin of vertebrates or backboned animals really started with the origin of vertebrates which is the first case behind us here, the very first fishes on the planet, and then going right through to tell a story of mammals, dinosaurs, birds and so on, but using the best material we had in the Western Australian Museum collections to tell that story.

Did you face many challenges while developing this gallery?

Did we face many challenges? Yes.  One was of course filling in the gaps where we didn’t have specimens that were necessary in telling that story of evolution. So that involved a lot of negotiating with other museums to get specimens on trade. We didn’t have a big budget at the time – we didn’t have money for buying specimens. But we’d often trade, you know, a fossil fish from Gogo for a, like, the Tyrannosaurus skull.  That’s worth ten thousand dollars. We got that by direct trade.  So it didn’t cost us any money, including freight to ship it out here.

What are your hopes for the New Museum?

The story we tell here is largely correct but it could be embellished and amended with latest news and latest discoveries.  I’ll give you an example.  There’s a fish that I discovered in 1986, prepared it myself, and we put it on display in the gallery here. And since the gallery opened in 1999 we recently discovered it had 3 unborn embryos inside it, and is the world’s oldest example of live birth. And so that’s not reflected on the label in there and nor are the embryos pointed out.  So, you know, there’s no other specimen in the world that shows a 380 million year old fish with 3 complete embryos in it. So hopefully that will be an important specimen to put in the new gallery but telling the full story of it.

Ken McNamara

My name is Ken McNamara. When the gallery was developed I was Head of Earth and Planetary Sciences and I was the project leader in charge of the development of the gallery.

What was your focus area when developing the content for this gallery?

My main expertise was – is – in invertebrate paleontology. So those display cases looking at animals that evolved in the last half a billion years. But also things like the stromatolites, the earliest evidence of life on earth – fossils from the Pilbara.  That’s something else that I’ve written about so I was involved in that.

But it was using particular fossils to tell a particular story.  And so the one I’ve got here which is of fossil ammonites, fantastic ones […] these were the last ones that existed before they became extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. So that means we could use this to talk a bit about extinction.

What are you most proud of about this gallery?

I suppose I’m most proud of when I walk around here quietly like I did last week and you just see small kids with their eyes open and their mouths open and they’re just staggered, they’re speechless. And the noise you get of them running around and just shouting because they’re interested, they’re excited by the gallery.