In 2020, the museum is celebrating 20 years in the LeFleur’s Bluff location. Throughout the year, we will share stories about the museum’s history.
Curious about the museum’s paleontology program? The museum’s current Paleontology Curator, George Phillips, gives us a brief overview of the program and the people responsible for its development.
The Paleontology Program is one of several natural science research programs in the Conservation & Biodiversity Section at MDWFP’s Mississippi Museum of Natural Science (MMNS). The Paleo Program was born into existence in the summer of 1978 and has had three curators since its inception.
The late MICHAEL FRAZIER was the first curator, coming to us from the University of Florida. Regrettably, however, he and his coworkers had their hands full for nearly a year dealing with the effects of the 1979 spring flood that devastated the museum and much of Jackson, MS.
One of Mike’s projects found him sieving sediments near Mayhew, Miss., for Late Pleistocene micromammal fossils. Assisted by well-known Columbus geologist Jack Kaye, Mike was able to recover a small diversity of rodents, including two cool temperate species that no longer occur in the area—the Meadow Vole and Southern Bog Lemming.
Mike was succeeded in 1981 by ELEANOR DALY, a graduate of the University of Kansas. Having specialized on the earliest tetrapods (four-legged animals) of the Kansas Late Paleozoic (315-252 million years ago), Eleanor had to completely change gears for a state with considerably younger vertebrate fossils that were ONLY 90 million years old and younger.
During her tenure, Eleanor excavated a mastodon beneath the old Vicksburg mall and two fossil whales, one of which is the holotype for the Late Eocene species Cynthiacetus maxwelli—named in part for the little village of Cynthia just outside of northwest Jackson.
One of her greatest contributions, published at least ten years prior to Google, was “A List, Bibliography and Index of the Fossil Vertebrates of Mississippi.” With the advent of widespread access to the internet, anyone born after the late 1990s will never appreciate how useful these indices were to researchers.
In 2003, newly returned from North Carolina State University, yours truly was offered the post of paleontology curator at MMNS. In that time, I have expanded the program considerably, but not without the help of a small, devoted contingent of volunteers, several outside research associates and collaborators (namely the Mississippi Office of Geology), numerous specimen donors, and the ongoing support of the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks to build an invaluable research base and reference collection documenting and reporting on Mississippi’s paleontological past as well as that of other southern states.
In 42 years, the collection has grown to 75,000 specimens composing four sub-collections—Vertebrate Paleontology, Invertebrate Paleontology, Paleobotany, Rocks & Minerals, Comparative Osteology, and Marine Invertebrate Zoology. Numerous articles have been published on MMNS fossils and many more are in preparation and planning.
Here’s to the future of paleontological research in Mississippi!
