Fiorillo's interest in paleontology runs much deeper than simply finding new things. "What we try to do is understand the mechanism behind the ecosystem, which will help tell us what was so different back then that let these big animals run around."
Fiorillo doesn't study things quite as obscure as the "left toe of a gecko." He is not just a paleontologist, but also a taphonomist, someone who studies how things get into the fossil record. "In other words," Fiorillo says, "I'm someone who pokes at a lot of dead things."
If Fiorillo's job sounds less than romantic, consider the work of Alex Barker, the museum's archeologist. The movies would have us believe that archeologists travel to exotic locales to find hidden treasure worth untold millions. On a recent afternoon, Barker was sitting in a basement lab in the museum writing tiny numbers on shards of pottery made hundreds of years ago.
"Archeologists don't dig to find things," he says, "they dig to find things out." What Barker wants to find out most is "how we went from an all-for-one-and-one-for-all system, without social hierarchy, to one where one person was considered better and more important than another," he says. "Well, much of the answer lies along the Red River and the Sabine River."
Barker is presently analyzing information excavated decades ago from a North Texas site called Sanders Farm. The results from the excavation, which had never been fully analyzed before, offers evidence that a complex culture existed in this part of the country hundreds of years before previously believed.
Barker was hired to develop a regional archeology department at the museum, but found his efforts undermined by the museum's other pressing needs. Six months after he arrived, Schulson made Barker chief curator, where among other things he is in charge of cataloging and preserving a huge number of specimens. Six months later, the board made him head of education as well. He also teaches at Southern Methodist University.
Other people complain that Barker is being spread too thin. But Barker minimizes the problem. "The museum is facing exactly what organisms it studies are facing," he says, "adapting to a changing environment."
Whether Fiorillo and Barker can help catapult the museum into some higher echelon of respectability remains to be seen. They both agree they have their work cut out for them.
Museum supporters wonder and worry whether Fiorillo and Barker will be able to fill their predecessors' shoes, particularly Barker, who has so many pairs to fill. "There's an unrealistic belief that if you can get more Ph.D.s and more published papers, it will mean more money in the bank and more federal grants," gripes Marilyn Stidham, former education director, "but who's going to answer the public's fossil questions? Who can interpret something so abstract and make it a living thing like Finsley did? He was a great educator."
Cathy Childers, a volunteer at the museum for the past 15 years, says the changes at the museum have left her sad and worried. "Their education program was the most organized, together program," says Childers, who has volunteered at numerous other institutions. "Today, after cutback after cutback, it's pathetic. They're trying to shut off education. They don't feel docents are necessary any more. I see more and more children's groups coming through without docents. The training we got was like a semester at SMU. Now we're being pushed through.
"I don't mind change," Childers adds. "If it's change for the better."
About the only thing everyone agrees on is that the role of a natural history museum has never been more important. Where once its role was about simply showing the diversity and origin of nature, now it is about understanding its fragility and how to save it.
"We live in a world facing problems--of the environment, of biodiversity," explains Jacobs. "If the general citizenry doesn't have the depth of knowledge to understand the problem, then we can't hope to fix it."
That's hard to argue with. But concerned citizens hope that the problems besetting the museum itself can be understood and fixed first. "There could be so much more there," says teacher Susan Campbell of Science Safari. "I hope it makes it. I don't care if anyone there publishes research. I just want a great experience for me and my kids.
