BREATHING WATERY LIFE INTO OLD DRY SHELLS: THE ANCIENT SEAS EXHIBIT AT THE MANITOBA MUSEUM

The Ancient Seas exhibit at the Manitoba Museum, opened in the spring of 2010, depicts the Late Ordovician tropical sea close to the present-day town of Churchill. Many marine life forms are presented in this enveloping three-screen animation. Along the front of a boulder shoreline, corals wave in the current. Offshore, an open, silty seafloor is home to sponges, seaweeds, and crinoids. Giant trilobites plow through the silt, searching for prey, and are in turn hunted by large endocerid cephalopods. Polychaete worms scavenge a dead trilobite. Eurypterids, nautiloid cephalopods, and conodont animals swim past. Hydrozoan jellyfish pulse with the plankton.

Each taxon is explained with fossil specimens and a key containing information about what it was and how it lived. The video format makes these details relevant and interesting to the visitor. To create an engaging and accurate video required considerable collaboration – not only with the animators, but with a group of scientific experts who provided the expertise required to bring the creatures “to life.” The result has been immensely successful in terms of audience; it has garnered considerable favorable press coverage and recently won a tourism award. It is drawing substantial numbers of visitors, turning a subject that had been something of a “walk-past” into a main attraction that engages young families for 10 minutes or more.

As visitors are enjoying the exhibit, they are asking questions, and genuinely learning about life, the Earth, and the past. We are intrigued that many of the questions are related to plate tectonics. One of the most-asked questions is how it could be that Churchill, which is now a subarctic place, was once in the tropics. When visitors discover the answer to this, they are encouraged to think about the magnitude of geological time and the scale of global change. It thus gives us an opportunity to provide information about the evolution of Earth and life, in a venue where the audience is receptive and interested.

In addition to the element of change, the exhibit had the objective of demonstrating biodiversity and marine ecosystems. Here in the middle of the continent, students are only familiar with a relatively small number of animal phyla. By delving into the distant past, we are able to present local examples of groups not known in terrestrial systems.