This exhibit is larger than life
Age of the Mastodon opens this month with plans to travel
The Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History is offering an exhibit of elephantine proportions for 2022 and beyond.
At the end of this month, the Halifax-based museum will launch a new interpretive experience about one of Nova Scotia’s biggest former residents.
“Age of the Mastodon opens on Feb. 26,” says Jeff Gray, manager of the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History. “It is essentially the life and times of the mastodons that would have been found here in Nova Scotia.”
Mastodons were once among the fauna of the province, about 80,000 years ago. The museum’s curators have had bones of the beast in its collection since the 1800s, although the highlight of this exhibit will be one member of the species unearthed at the National Gypsum Quarry in Milford in 1991.
“Gypsum is a mineral that was deposited by the evaporation of an ancient ocean; it dissolves very quickly in water,” explains Dr. Tim Fedak, curator of geology at the Museum of Natural History, who has been preparing this and other specimens for display.
“That’s what happened to this mastodon; 80,000 years ago, it was walking along a pond, a wooded area and there was a sinkhole lake. It got buried in that sinkhole and the skeleton sunk down and was preserved for the gypsum quarry operators to find. They found tusks and bones and phoned the museum.”
Among the pieces Fedak is preparing for display are tusks discovered at the Milford site, alongside fossils of more contemporary critters – such as turtles and beavers – that lived alongside the mastodon, as well as other mastodon and mammoth samples found across the province. The museum has also purchased a full-size mastodon skeleton replica to highlight the size factor.
“We had found mastodon remains in a couple different
spots before that,” says Fedak. “The first and oldest is that femur, which is an upper leg bone, and that’s from Cape Breton. That was found in 1834.”
Also featured were mammoth teeth dredged up by fishermen on George's Bay, which hints that the province’s topography was quite different once, when a glacier shoved that part of the region above sea level.
“It was so heavy, it pushed Nova Scotia down,” says Fedak, adding the province was under two kilometres of ice 30,000 years back. “George’s Bay is now 60 metres underwater.”
Stewiacke is the proud home of Mastodon Ridge, decorated with a life-sized model of the creature. Many Nova Scotians are not aware we had such prehistoric beasts here, Fedak surmises. Showcasing that fact is one of the educational aspects of this exhibit.
Gray adds the exhibit will highlight the curatorial work museums do that is often behind the scenes.
“We preserved it and we’ve kept it. We share components of it for research with other institutions around the world. Then, we’re restoring them, putting pieces of it back together, and putting it on display,” says Gray.
The Age of the Mastodon will not be the first time these specimens have been on display, but it’s the first time it’s all collected into a specific narrative.
“Part of this exhibit is really borne out of the reality of COVID-19,” says Gray. “Mostly this time of the year is when we’d be doing our biggest exhibits. Because of COVID, it’s a challenge at looking at doing those kinds of shows, because you’re not sure if you’re going to be able to be open.”
The exhibit will also be an opportunity for the museum to experiment with travelling outside of the Summer Street location and into communities across the province that would otherwise never have the chance to house an experience like this one.
“It blossomed into the idea of what if we were able to share this mastodon around the province? Right now, we’re looking at having upwards of three smaller exhibits. The idea is that one might have the skull of the cast, one might have the femur or the humerus, one might have a leg. If we were in the South Shore, where teeth were found, we would add teeth to the case,” said Gray.
The hope is to get the smaller “micro-exhibits” into more remote corners of the province and travel across the region until 2026, when the skeleton will be installed in a new permanent exhibit in time for the Milford find’s 35th anniversary.
Age of the Mastodon opens Feb. 26 and will remain until January 2023 before it starts touring.