Smithsonian sea monsters get Texas flair
Museum displays fossils found by SMU paleontologists
DALLAS — Three weeks before his team’s fossil finds were to go on display at one of the world’s most famous natural history museums, Louis Jacobs stood in a basement lab at Southern Methodist University sanding the lower jaw of a 72-million-year-old sea monster.
His colleague, Michael Polcyn, sat nearby, dabbing sealant on a model of the animal’s upper jaw and skull.
That was the sort of work — preparing models and fossils — that Jacobs had done early in his career, before he became a professor, before he hunted for fossils in Alaska, Antarctica, Malawi, Cameroon and Texas; before he dug up the bones of dinosaurs on display at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas; before he wrote three books and dozens of peer-reviewed papers.
Now Jacobs, 70, in small rectangular glasses, his wavy white hair disarrayed, looks out of place in a lab coat and work gloves, and Polcyn pokes fun at him.
“Because of the way I came into paleontology, I didn’t have a staff like this guy,” says Polcyn, a self-taught paleontologist who helped build and sell a telecommunications company before he joined the staff at SMU. Polcyn adds that Jacobs did more fossil work when he was younger.
“Before I grew old and lazy,” jokes Jacobs, and the two laugh.
Then Polcyn turns serious. “We’ve never put an exhibit of this scale together,” he says.
Jacobs and Polcyn, along with a small coterie of staff, students and volunteers, worked tirelessly for months getting ready for the biggest show of their careers. In a matter of days the crew packed its handiwork into a rented truck and drove it 1,300 miles to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
On Nov. 9, the museum unveiled “Sea Monsters Unearthed,” an exhibit that showcases fossils that Polcyn, Jacobs and an international team of scientists found along the coastal cliffs of Angola in West Africa between 2005 and 2016. The finds date from about 88 million to about 72 million years ago, starting after Africa and South America drifted apart and opened the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Among the animals they discovered were ferocious sea creatures, some with long necks and paddle-like legs, flying reptiles, 3foot-long oysters and extinct species of whales.
They wanted to find out what happened to marine reptiles as the southern Atlantic Ocean began to open about 120 million years ago, when the southern supercontinent of Gondwana split into what is now Africa and South America, connecting the South Atlantic Ocean with the northern oceans about 90 million years ago.
They chose Angola because scientists had discovered an early mosasaur species along its coast in the early 1960s.
“We wanted to know what happened when you put a new ocean where there wasn’t one before,” said Jacobs.
Inspecting a hillside in 2006, Polcyn noticed some vertebrae sticking out of a rock. It turned into one of the expedition’s biggest finds and forms the centerpiece of “Sea Monsters Unearthed”: a large mosasaur with three partially digested mosasaurs in its belly.
The team excavated the hillside, encapsulating the fossils in protective plaster jackets, and loaded its contents onto a container ship to Houston for its overland journey to SMU.
The show, which opened just six months after Jacobs’ retirement from SMU, is special to him for many reasons. As an educator, he marvels at the Smithsonian’s reach: 7 million visitors per year, as Jacobs and Polcyn keep reminding each other.
It also fulfills his mission of giving something of value back to Angola. The exhibition will travel to Africa after finishing its run at the Smithsonian in 2020. All the fossils will be returned to Angola as well.