Exhibit A: Evidence shows Las Vegas Natural History Museum has some staying power

By Kristen Peterson

Monday, Jan. 19, 2004 | 8:23 a.m.

Call it a bittersweet moment.

As the Las Vegas Natural History Museum opens its new whale exhibit Saturday, the staff says a tearful farewell to "The Tiniest Giants: Discovering Dinosaur Eggs."

The touring exhibit of dinosaur eggs stayed six months at the museum. It broke attendance records and brought much-needed publicity to the facility.

"It's sad to see the eggs exhibit go," said Marilyn Gillespie, director of the museum at 900 Las Vegas Blvd. North. "It was such a positive experience for us. A lot of people discovered us for the first time."

But Gillespie is preparing for a new wave of visitors to see "Whales." The permanent collection includes scale models of orca, pilot and beluga whales and a replica skull of a prehistoric whale's jaw so large that visitors will be able to stand inside.

The exhibit joins the live sharks, eels, lion fish, turtles and sea horses in the museum's Marine Life Gallery.

Whale and porpoise vertebrae are displayed to show the size of the mammoth creatures. A narwhal tusk reveals the origin of the myth of the unicorn.

"We're talking about whales, whale conservation and the whale family," Gillespie said. "They're very nurturing parents. The mamas help them swim. They help push them up for their first gulp of air."

Compared to similar attractions, such as the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay, the Marine Life Gallery is greatly under-funded. But Gillespie is used to being in the shadow of the Strip's billion-dollar casinos.

"There's a tremendous amount of competition for people's time," Gillespie said. "When you're in the entertainment capital of the world, tourists are not coming to see the museums. We miss out on that revenue. But we are here for our community, our children, because it's important for them to have."

In the spring the museum will host a touring exhibit that explores prehistoric and modern-day cats of different species. In the fall, it will host "Archaeology: The Dawn of History."

The museum's displays continue to grow. In the wake of "The Tiniest Giants" departure, the museum was given the exhibit's life-size aluminum sculpture of an Argentinosaurus and a colorful collection of dinosaur eggs and hatchlings.

"A lot of it was going to go into storage," Gillespie said. "The Los Angeles Natural History Museum gifted us some of this exhibit because it was its last stop.

"It's really nice. We're a fledgling museum."

Fledgling, but flourishing.

The museum has had a storied life. It started on East Tropicana Avenue, then moved to the Jockey Club, where it closed shortly after. The museum, then housed with no funding in a gutted former Elks lodge, was revived by former museum volunteer Gillespie.

Now 12 years old, the museum has Smithsonian Affiliation, corporate donors and continues to inch forward, exhibit by exhibit, on a tiny budget of $500,000 a year.

"We started with nothing," Gillespie said. "We sprang out of the ashes. If you look at our beginnings I doubt that you'll find any other museum with this many strikes against it. We had no money, no assets."

Growth spurt

If it sounds like Gillespie is boasting, she has the right. Despite the competition, the nonprofit has tugged along successfully.

In 38,000 square feet, Gillespie and her staff have developed creative ways to display dinosaur replicas, taxidermic wildlife (such as a giraffe) and marine wildlife.

Roughly 32,000 schoolchildren pass through the museum each year on field trips. Even more come through with their families. Museum membership is 995.

A $3 million taxidermic wildlife animal collection donated by Californian Bruno Scherrer, a founder of Safari Club International in Los Angeles, fills out the museum's African Savannah exhibit in the basement.

Also in the basement, visitors can observe a replica of the tracks of Australopithecus primates whose footprints were cemented by volcanic ash and rain 3.6 million years ago by an erupting volcano in Tanzania.

A Nevada room displays regional plant and animal life. Its weekend science program offers half-hour workshops on sea life, weather, dinosaurs and photography.

An interactive children's room includes computer games and archaeological digs.

"On a shoestring budget (Gillespie) has done an amazing job and provided scientific and cultural resources for the community," said Stephen Rowland, a professor of geology at UNLV and advisor to the museum.

"In just 12 years it's come along. And she has very ambitious plans."

Paleontology

Rowland has been at UNLV 25 years and on the museum's board since its days at the Jockey Club. He's been a longtime proponent of the museum and brings his paleontology students to see and study the exhibits.

But not everyone is as positive. Though Frommers' Las Vegas 2004 travel guide refers to the Las Vegas Natural History Museum as "worn around the edges, but very sweet and relaxed," it also says, "this humble temple of taxidermy harkens back to elementary school field trips circa 1965."

"I'd like to see them get more money, more resources," said Benjamin Dattilo, a paleontologist and visiting professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"It's an important thing to have. I think they need more to work with," said Dattilo, who has worked as a dinosaur excavator at Brigham Young University and served as collections manager for vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History.

"The Museum of Natural History in Cincinnati is a big thing. They took over a huge '30s-style train station. What they started with was pretty close to what we have got here, but we were a collections museum. It wasn't necessarily the best collections in the world, but they started small."

Old city, new city

Charles Ivy, a former board member and owner of Learning Is Fun stores, said he realized the museum finally had a stake in the city when corporate sponsors such as Southwest Airlines (whose spokeswoman, Roz Santangelo, chairs the museum's board of directors) and Wells Fargo stepped up.

"You've got to withstand the test of time long enough until somebody notices you," Ivy said. "Now (Gillespie) has gotten through the critical mass. With that level of corporate interest you've got a shot at success."

Also, he said, "Marilyn has stretched a nickel and a dime further than anyone has. We all can't be a Chicago Field Museum. It never will be a site of research. But the excitement it can generate in a 7-year-old, a 9-year-old is key. It gets the little mind turning."

The city of Las Vegas provided the building for the Las Vegas Natural History Museum and there have been fund-raisers. But natural history museums in other cities have far more resources than does Las Vegas.

The Delaware Museum of Natural History in Wilmington, also a nonprofit, has been operating for about 30 years. It has 2,000 members and 70,000 annual visitors and is in the middle of a $5 million fund-raising effort to renovate its building design.

The San Diego Natural History Museum, located in Balboa Park, has experienced more than 100 years of growth and financial contributions, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has an IMAX theater and planetarium in addition to its prehistoric displays.

"There are different models of museums," Dattilo said. "A full-fledged museum has collection and research departments.

"I personally would like to see a place where I could reposit specimens from around here rather than send them across the country."

Future-o-saurus

Rowland, who has been involved in long-term planning, said he would like to see the museum include more participant activities.

"Denver museum has a paleontology certification opportunity," Rowland said. "People learn how to excavate, preserve and prepare fossils. That kind of thing we could do in Las Vegas. It would allow people the chance to experience hands-on science."

Gillespie looks forward to someday including an exhibit about the Arctic and another on insects, which would use robots.

"I'm from Albuquerque," Gillespie said. "In Albuquerque there are five things to do and the museum is one of them. In Las Vegas there are 50 things to do and the museum isn't one of them."

But there are always a few who stray from the Strip or seek out museums in any city. Taking pictures of dinosaurs for their grandchildren, Thea Provost from Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., said, "We've had enough of the casinos. We're here for two months.

"The casinos are impressive," her husband, Tom, added, "but they all got one thing in common. There's a lot to see outside the casinos."

In Gillespie's office is displayed a draft of an expanded museum with a new facade.

"This is what we want to be when we grow up," Gillespie said. "I have a very small budget. But we've managed to get a great deal of support from the community.

"It's been an ongoing development of remodeling a building that was not meant to be a museum. We've had to be very creative and resourceful. I have to scale things down to what we can afford. It's very restrictive to replicate dinosaurs with 11-foot ceilings.

"There were times I had no idea how I was going to keep it open, but then something else beautiful happens. We never had to take a step back."