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Show Dinosaur Exhibit Makes Debut in U Library, 'New ' Museum s Opening Slated for Late 1968 Support for the museum ... come principally fToT donors. Sizable JontibuSonl"!?16 already been made by S ru Cooper, Mr. Leland Swaner T Harold Burton, Mr. George" Streator Chevrolet Co and This is Utah's museum. We 2 i mate that 90 per cent of our JS" dents"" n0n-Un-ersityr Z i , : -4 4 i by Suzanne Dean Dinosaurs are coming to the University Uni-versity of Utah library. They, along with 170 exhibits representing the worlds of anthropology, anthro-pology, biology and geology will bring the history of Utah's plants, animals and geologic features to Universty students and the public when the Utah Museum of Natural History opens late in 1968 in the present George Thomas Library Building. The museum will contain four major exhibit halls Arrthropolgy, Biological Sciences, Earth Science and Paleontology. A systematic approach in the exhibits ex-hibits will enable a visitor to trace, in logical, time-sequence order, the steps in Utah's natural history, from its geologic development to the rise of man. The museum will particularly aim at showing the relationship between man and his environment and will, besides explaining how plants and animals survive in their natural habitat, attempt to show the ways in which they are exploited ex-ploited by man. "The Utah Museum of Natural History is envisioned as a complete natural history museum focused upon Utah and its varied resources, exhibited and interpreted in such a way as to emphasize the interdependence inter-dependence of systems and elements ele-ments of nature, and the manner in which man has classified and established estab-lished order in nature, exploiting nature selectively for his own survival," sur-vival," according to Dr. Herbert L. Jennings, Professor of Anthorpol-ogy Anthorpol-ogy and recently-appointed director direc-tor of the museum. The talents of instructors and students in several departments have been co-ordinated and directed direct-ed towards the long and pains-taking process of planning, researching research-ing and constructing the museum. design must be attractively planned and sketched according to artistic principals. Then the museum laboratory labor-atory takes over, building cases and panels, re-producing or preserving specimens, and creating labels through a silk-screen process. Each leaf, branch and small animal ani-mal must be stamped in plastic or rubber by a mold made from the actual specimen, and then carefully painted to match natural conditions. condi-tions. Larger animals are chemically chemical-ly preserved and stuffed or sent away to be de-hydrated and preserved pre-served by a so-called "freeze-dry" method. Planning of the 170 exhibits is now 15 per cent finished and their construction nearly 10 per cent complete. Mr. Gail C. Hammond is serving as artist-preparator of the museum exhibits and Merrill Hamelton as his assistant. The crew also includes in-cludes work-study students and high school Neighborhood Youth Corps workers. Architecture students prepared blueprints and suggestions for adapting the present library facility to meet the museum's needs, while an advisory committee of departmental depart-mental instructors aided in planning plan-ning the all-over museum contents. This first phase of planning is now 80 per cent complete, according to Donald Hague, currator of the exhibits. ex-hibits. The exhibits themselves are slowly taking shape in an old barracks bar-racks on upper campus. Most are drawn from existing collections of various departments. Others are being be-ing drawn live from nature and then preserved and mounted for display. The dinosaurs will stand in a pit area covering about one-third of the present library reading room. The 28-ft. ceilings there will provide pro-vide necessary space for the towering tower-ing specimans. A sneak preview of one of these creatures, a Campto-saurus, Campto-saurus, is now available in the geology building. Other major exhibits include a giant relief-map of Utah which lights up to show national parks and geologic features at the visitor's visi-tor's press of a button, and a display dis-play of ' three Utah Mule Deer, which is currently being prepared by taxidermists in Denver. The preparation of exhibits is a complex procedure requiring months of work and ranging in cost from 5 to 25 thousand dollars per exhibit. After the subject of an exhibit is selected it must be thoroughly researched and a script written. The |