Tag Archives: mastodon

Cool off this summer with the Public Museum’s newest exhibits

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“Ice Age: Michgian’s Frozen Secrets” features how Michigan landscapes looked thousands of years ago. (Courtesy, Grand Rapids Public Museum)

By Adam Brown
WKTV Contributor

Have you ever wished to go back in time to the dawn of the Ice Age? Or look at the impacts of snow on a global scale? Now you can, with the Grand Rapids Public Museum’s new exhibits Ice Age: Michigan’s Frozen Secrets and Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact.

What Are the New Exhibits?

Set to run May 20 through Sept. 3, the new exhibits put a unique Michigan spin on global events. In addition, they continue the GRPM’s mission of educating the public through immersive and enriching displays. Of the GRPM’s new additions, Public Museum’s Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations Dustin Tyler noted, “Ice Age: Michigan’s Frozen Secrets and Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact are two incredibly unique and exciting exhibits that we are thrilled to bring to our community. We believe both exhibits will provide visitors with unforgettable educational experiences and inspire curiosity about Michigan’s history and the impact of snow on our environment.”

Ice Age: Michigan’s Frozen Secrets

Ice Age: Michigan’s Frozen Secrets localizes the historical period, focusing on modern-day West Michigan when prehistoric animals dominated the Earth. The exhibit depicts how the landscape looked thousands of years ago, with a chance to interact with some of the area’s native creatures. In addition, patrons can enjoy tactile experiences where they can handle actual fossilized bones and teeth from the era. The available bones come from a selection of a recently discovered mastodon in the Grand Rapids area.

Visitors will be able touch mastodon bones that were found in Grand Rapids. (Courtesy, Grand Rapids Public Museum)

In August 2022, mastodon bones were uncovered during a construction dig at the Grand Rapids property of Michael and Courtney Clapp. Wanting to keep the artifacts local and accessible to the public, the Clapps donated their namesake Clapp Family Mastodon to the Grand Rapids Public Museum. The recovered bones form the basis of the Ice Age exhibit. In this fully immersive experience, visitors are encouraged to touch and observe the bones and teeth, connecting them to the life of early humans in the area.

Though designed to supplement material learned in the classroom, Ice Age: Michigan’s Frozen Secrets is geared toward all ages, per GRPM Marketing Manager Sara Olsen. People naturally question what their home state might have looked like in the prehistoric era. This exhibit is designed to answer those burning questions by allowing museumgoers to physically interact with what came before.

Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact 

Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact takes the opposite route, looking at snow globally and how it impacts worldwide climate systems. No matter where we live, snow impacts us all. In this exhibit, patrons can examine all the ways this natural weather phenomenon affects the globe.

“Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact” will look at how snow impacts worldwide climate systems. (Courtesy, Grand Rapids Public Museum)

While new to the GRPM, Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact was initially developed by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in Portland, Oregon. Like the GRPM, the OMSI is devoted to fostering learning and curiosity in its visitors through interactive experiments, exhibits, and demonstrations for a younger, school-age demographic.

In Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact, guests answer one fundamental question. What is snow? An immersive digital snowstorm enables visitors to interact with snow crystals, examining how each is truly unique. While all ages may enjoy the exhibit, the tactile games make the experience especially rewarding for the younger crowd by allowing them to take an interactive role in the process, per Olson. Guests can also listen to oral histories about snow from elders and culture leaders of the Inupiaq tribes to supplement the interactive game. These elements seek to educate the public about the importance of snow in the worldwide climate system and how each tiny crystal has a global impact.

Despite differing scopes and content, the GRPM designed Ice Age: Michigan’s Frozen Secrets and Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact to work in tandem with one another. Both offer glimpses into climate and weather patterns over time and allow patrons to interact with those patterns while building an understanding of the world around them.

 

Guests who purchase general admission tickets to the GRPM between May 20 and Sept. 3 can participate in the new exhibits, with free admission for those 17 and under. In addition, members can receive early access to the exhibits through an exclusive members only preview. Those interested may find information on museum hours and ticket prices at the GRPM’s official website.

Mastodon bones discovered by Kent County road crews

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By WKTV Staff
joanne@wktv.org

Dr. Cory Redman, Grand Rapids Public Museum’s science curator, works to excavate the mastodon bones. (GRPM)

Kent County road crews got a little surprise as they were working to replace a culvert along the county line on 22 Mile Road: they discovered a femur bone.

Turns out that the bone is part of a mastodon with officials from the Grand Rapids Public Museum and the University of the Michigan contacted to come to the site to excavate. University of Michigan officials confirmed that the bones are mastodon.

There is some speculation that there may be two set of bones. Once the bones have been excavated, they will be processed by the University of Michigan. The bones are scheduled to be returned to the Grand Rapids Public Museum per the landowner’s wishes.

Mastodon versus mammoth

The mastodon is a member of the order Proboscidea, which also includes the mammoths, modern elephants, and a wide variety of extinct elephant-like species that evolved more than 60 million years ago.

The American Mastodon was wide-spread across all of North America from Alaska to central Mexico. It was smaller than the mammoth and they used their teeth to clip and crush twigs. Mammoths grazed on grass. Also, mastodons had straighter tusks and both the body and head of the mastodon is longer and squatter than the woolly mammoth

It is estimated that more 300 mastodon fossils have been found in southern Michigan and in fact, the state’s fossil is a mastodon fossil. In 2016, a UM-lead team unearthed Michigan’s most complete ice age mastodon since the 1940s in Mayville, located in Michigan’s thumb area. The team found 70 percent of the mastodon skeleton.

The Grand Rapids Public Museum has several mastodon fossils in its collection including the most famous local find, “Smitty,” which was 40 percent of a full mastodon skeleton found in 1985 in Grandville. Smitty’s skeletal material has been radiocarbon dated by multiple researchers, yielding dates ranging from 10,920 to 12,160 years ago.

The Museum also has the Moorland Mastodon which was found in 1904 in the Muskegon area and which has been on display for several years at the museum. Dr. Cory Redman, who is the museum’s science curator, has been working on restoring the Moorland Mastodon to a state that would be better for is preservation.

To stay up-to-date on the Kent City mastodon, visit the Grand Rapids Public Museum’s Facebook page.

As a side note, the Grand Rapids Public Museum currently has the exhibit “Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs.” For more information about the exhibit, visit grpm.org.

In the GRPM collection: The Moorland Mastodon

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Grand Rapids Public Museum Science Curator Dr. Cory Redman discusses the preservation of the Moorland Mastodon. (Video by WKTV)


By WKTV Staff
joanne@wktv.org

Many people who visited the former Grand Rapids Public Museum’s home on Jefferson may remember the Moorland Mastodon.

The almost complete mastodon was found on a farm in Moorland, Michigan in 1904. The Kent Scientific Museum of Grand Rapids (now the Grand Rapids Public Museum) acquired the mastodon for $75 with the goal of putting it on display at the museum. According to a 1940 Grand Rapids Herald article, the skeleton measured “18 feet long, 10 feet high and 6 feet wide, with the tusks themselves being nearly 6 feet in length.”

 

This photo from the Ravenna Times shows what the Moorland Mastodon looked like on display at the former home of the Grand Rapids Public Museum. (Ravenna Area Historical Society)

When the museum moved to its current location, the mastodon was not moved over as it was starting to deteriorate, said GRPM Science Curator Dr. Cory Redman.

Instead, the bones were transferred to the museum’s collections, where it was dismantled so as it could be preserved for future generations to look at and study.

In this segment about the museum’s collections, Redman discusses the importance of the preservation work being done, some of which is to correct past-museum practices, and the techniques being used.

Only about 10 percent of the museum’s collection is on display with the rest housed in the museum’s collections facility. The museum has about 250,000 items in its collection. To see some of those items or to learn more, visit grpmcollections.org.