Fetching Fossils and Unwrapping Mannequins: Here’s What Happens When a Museum Exhibition Closes

For the past seven years, the National Museum of Natural History’s exhibition “Objects of Wonder” has displayed an array of spectacular specimens from scintillating slabs of stone to a whale’s earwax.

This month, “Objects of Wonder” closed for a redesign. This will return hundreds of treasured specimens back into the museum’s collection — where researchers will be able to easily access and study them. This makes space for an array of other objects from the collection to go on display — where visitors can see a sampling of the museum’s most intriguing items.

De-installing any exhibition is a massive undertaking. But this exhibition’s vast array of items, which includes everything from individual insect specimens to a monumental house front, makes the de-installation process particularly complex.

According to Jackie Gubany, Project Manager of the “Objects of Wonder” de-installation at the museum, returning hundreds of the museum’s most treasured objects to their collections requires a “delicate dance” of interactions across multiple departments She must coordinate with the museum’s security team, which closely monitors items in the exhibits with alarmed cases. She will also work with her colleagues on the exhibition production team to open up the displays themselves, which can be a surprisingly labor-intensive process.

Many of Gubany’s closest collaborators during the months-long deinstallation process will be experts from the museum’s various science departments. Each of these departments has items on display in “Objects of Wonder.” To make the deinstallation as orderly and efficient as possible, Gubany and her colleagues work together to prioritize which objects come off display first.

The first things to return to the collection are objects that require increased security like gemstones and other precious minerals. Next up are many of the exhibit’s anthropological objects, which require delicate treatment and conservation at the Museum Support Center, the Smithsonian’s offsite collection facility in Maryland.

"This is one of my favorite exhibits because it features the wonders of our museum's collections. [Deinstalling it] involves coordination with all of the departments throughout the museum."

— Jackie Gubany, NMNH Exhibits Production Specialist

Many of the most cumbersome removal projects are saved for last. In the case of “Objects of Wonder,” this includes the fossilized skeleton of Enaliarctos, an ancestral pinniped that looked like a pint-size sea lion. This Enaliarctos fossil, which was discovered along the Oregon coast by noted fossil hunter Douglas Emlong, remains partially entombed in a slab of surrounding rock. Altogether, the specimen weighs a few hundred pounds.

To move such a hefty fossil, Gubany and her team will work closely with experts from the museum’s paleobiology department. These preparators are well-versed in handling bulky yet fragile specimens.

Once the team takes apart the display, moving this particular fossil will require all hands on deck. “We’ll work together to gently lift the slab off of the display base, walk it into a clear space on the exhibit floor, and place it on a heavy-duty rolling cart,”said Michelle Pinsdorf, a fossil preparator in the museum’s paleobiology department. Once Pinsdorf and the team have the skeleton on the cart, they can wheel it back to the paleobiology collection space, where a mechanical lift will gingerly place the fossil onto a shelf. The last step is updating the specimen’s records to reflect that it is off exhibit and available once again for researchers to study.

The Enaliarctos skeleton is far from the only fossil featured in “Objects of Wonder.” The exhibition also contains a mounted fossil squirrel “gnawing” on petrified walnuts and the femur of Apatosaurus, a long-necked sauropod from the Jurassic which stretched more than 70 feet long. “Every fossil is unique and there are a wide variety of mounting methods, so they all have their challenges to de-install and move around,” Pinsdorf said. Ideally, the paleo team previously documented the process of installing the fossil in the exhibit. This makes removing the fossil easy — all the team needs to do is retrace the steps of the installation.

However, the team is often forced to get creative when moving fossils in crowded exhibition spaces. According to Pinsdorf, critical thinking and constant communication amongst the team are essential before and during the fossil move. They also need to be able to make a quick fix on the fly. Pinsdorf always has a triage kit handy to help stabilize fossils and a first aid kit ready to patch up anyone on the team. “Nobody’s perfect and neither are fossils,” Pinsdorf said.

“Objects of Wonder” has many oversized objects that will come off display. “The objects in this exhibit were selected specifically because they truly inspire wonder,” said Rebecca Kaczkowski, a conservator in the museum’s anthropology department. “Some of them are just enormous!” 

The largest item in “Objects of Wonder” is a 38-foot house front from a Tsimshian village in British Columbia. Covered in intricate designs detailing the story of Nagunaks, a powerful undersea spirit chief, and the Killer Whale clan, the structure was initially collected in 1875 for display in the U.S. Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. It remains one of the only complete Tsimshian house fronts in a museum.

The house front is composed of 20 different segments, each of which must be carefully lifted off the wall and placed inside three custom-made aluminum pallets. Once the sections of the house front are loaded, each pallet will weigh around 700 pounds. “Just rolling those through the museum takes a team,” Kaczkowski said. The pallets are then transported by truck out to the Museum Support Center.

Once they arrive in Maryland, the segments are placed in an anoxia chamber for three weeks to eradicate any potential insect pests as part of the museum’s routine Integrated Pest Management program. “The last thing that we would want is to bring a hitchhiker back into the storage space and have a big infestation affect the bulk of the collection,” Kaczkowski said. After the house front is quarantined, it will move to Kaczkowski’s lab for a condition report and any needed conservation work before returning to the museum’s collection.

Over the next few months, Kaczkowski and her team will carefully remove several other anthropological items from “Objects of Wonder.” The exhibition features a mannequin of a Fijian chief wearing a ceremonial tapa, a barkcloth fabric made in Fiji and other Pacific islands. In the collection, this barkcloth is stored on a device reminiscent of a padded spool to retain the structure of the material. Kaczkowski and her team will carefully unwrap the tapa-clad mannequin as they load and wind the barkcloth fabric onto the spool-like storage device (see image below). 

Shepherding anthropological objects to and from museum exhibitions is an important aspect of Kaczkowski’s job as a conservator. She sees exhibitions like “Objects of Wonder” as a way to bridge the gap between the museum’s unparalleled collections and the general public. “Exhibits allow everybody to see the objects,” she said. 

Safely returning the objects to the collections also serves a valuable purpose. “Bringing these objects back to storage allows researchers and community members to actually interact with the objects more closely,” Kaczkowski said.

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Jack Tamisiea | | READ MORE

Jack Tamisiea is a Science Communications Specialist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. In addition to covering all things natural history for the museum's blog, Smithsonian Voices, he tracks media coverage and coordinates filming activities for the museum's Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Jack recently completed his masters in science writing at Johns Hopkins University and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, National Geographic and other science-focused publications. In his free time, he loves exploring the outdoors with a sketchbook and camera. You can read more of Jack's work at https://jacktamisiea.com.