Cracking open a plate of sandstone to find a well-preserved, 52 million year-old fish was one of the most striking experiences of my life. Mine were the first eyes to glimpse this fish in the intervening time and the first human eyes ever to do so. Fifty-two million years is the equivalent of 520,000 hundred-year human lifespans end-to-end. Our species is perhaps 300,000 years old (maybe more), or 3,000 hundred-year lifespans. As the kids strangely say, it’s been a minute.
The funny thing is that initially I was not too excited to make it up to Fossil Butte National Monument in Wyoming, and to the nearby private quarry where I found the fish, because the fossils were so “young.” I mean, this ancient lakebed is some fourteen million years younger than the asteroid collision that caused the extinction of all (non-avian) dinosaurs and killed off most other complex life. Yet the physical act of splitting the rocks impressed the fish into my memory and my imagination. The museum out there also is super-impressive; they even have coprolite (fossilized poop) exhibits in the restrooms.
My trip started in Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado and Utah. This is where the “real” fossils are, the real Jurassic park. Here you can touch fossilized dinosaur bones of creatures that lived 150 million years ago. For perspective, the time between those dinosaurs and the last dinosaurs is greater than the time between the last dinosaurs and us.
Yet the Wall of Bones in Utah, as overwhelming as it is, contains only a small fraction of the dinosaur fossils discovered at the site. Most of the large specimens were stripped out and shipped elsewhere. A diplodocus (long-neck plant eater) originally sent to the Carnegie Museum eventually made its way to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
The roots of Denver’s nature museum
Denver’s nature museum has its roots in the business community. That’s a main point I got from Rachel Stenz’s history of the museum, recently published by History Colorado. Edwin Carter made his money in mining and then retired to a Breckenridge cabin to pursue naturalism. Carter “collected specimens” (killed and mounted animals) that eventually formed a centerpiece of the museum when it opened on July 1, 1908, along with mineral displays. (My family refers to the wildlife halls of the museum as the “Dead Zoo,” conveniently down the street from the live zoo.)
John Campion, miner and sugar-beet grower, served as the museum’s first president of the board of directors. The museum, Stenz writes, was intended to showcase Colorado’s mining and hunting opportunities and to promote tourism and the young state’s prestige. Campion himself donated a $50,000 collection of gold ore and other minerals, the Rocky Mountain News reported in 1907, the equivalent of nearly two million dollars today.
The Rocky reported on February 22, 1914, “Originally conceived and organized by twenty-five of Denver’s most prominent and substantial business men, who not only provided funds for the present building, but for the purchase of the Carter collection of birds and mammals as well, [the museum’s] growth has been phenomenal.”
Obviously the museum also had an educational mission. The same news report states, “It is only of recent years that the educational advantages of museums have been appreciated. The relations of man, bird, and insect were not even considered. Teaching this and stimulating an interest in natural history in children is one of the prime objects of the museum.”
Colorful leadership
Poking around the newspaper archives, I discovered that Campion was a rather colorful figure. The Rocky reported in 1901 that the Fish and Game Commissioner denied Campion a hunting license for sheep and elk, intended to add “specimens” to the Carter collection, on grounds that Campion was “not a fit person” as he had “been arrested in the past for violating the game laws.”
In 1902, a judge refused to seat Campion as a member of the jury in a murder trial, owing to questions of Campion’s citizenship based on his service to Prince Edward Island. A few years prior, Campion was sued in a mining dispute.
But Campion had nothing on Jesse Figgins, the museum’s first director. Stenz’s claims of “systemic racism” at the museum cannot easily be dismissed, given that Figgins was a registered member of the Ku Klux Klan. Figgins’ ties to the KKK only came to light in 2021. Stenz suspects that Figgins’s racist views led him to approve a sugar-beet display at the museum that promoted “white-dominated narratives” and ignored “noncitizens and nonwhite” immigrants who worked in the industry.
That doesn’t mean we have to take all of Stenz’s critiques at face value. She claims that a golden eagle exhibit showing a “nesting female” displayed “gender biases.” Yet the Audubon Society reports that the “female remains with young most of the time at first, while [the] male does most hunting, bringing prey to nest.” It’s plausible that some of the museum’s exhibits conveyed some bias, yet Stenz concedes the obvious that there really can be some gender differences in nature.
Figgins was no minor figure; he played a major role in the development of the museum for a quarter-century, from 1910 to 1935. In 2013, the museum published an extraordinary, 429-page document relating its own history. (This was before it became known that Figgins was in the KKK.) This document states, “Figgins would come to have a profound influence on the young Museum, establishing it as an important local and national institution. In his tenure at the Museum, Figgins would launch its core exhibit spaces and its enduring commitment to engaging the general public in science and the natural world.”
Perhaps ironically in retrospect, the document states, “Although Figgins was a respected naturalist and museum executive, he would become most well-known for his contribution to the understanding of the New World’s ancient human history because of the discovery of the Folsom [hunting] point in 1927.”
The museum’s chapter on paleontology emphasizes Figgins’s role in putting the museum on the paleontological map during the first half the Twentieth Century. After Figgins left, paleontology at the museum languished until 1998, when the museum hired Richard Stucky and, later, Kirk Johnson (now at the Smithsonian).
In retrospect, we might suspect that Figgins’s racism was relevant to something that the museum history reports: “In January 1935 Figgins was sent human remains found eight miles east of Folsom, reportedly 13 feet deep along a riverbank. Unlike his more rigorous approach, now Figgins simply compared the skull’s morphology with Paleolithic examples from Europe. He pronounced the remains a new human species, dubbed Homo novusmundus. His claim was met with disdain, and years later the remains were found to be only about 3,000 years old, and all ancient human remains in North America are considered to this day to be of the same species: Homo sapiens sapiens.”
Despite Figgins’s scientific missteps and his shameful associations, Figgins played a major role in turning Denver’s nature museum into a world-class institution. Here are some of the lessons I glean from this. People are complicated. Most people through history do not stand up well in light of modern moral standards, and we can expect future generations to judge us similarly harshly. People with profound character flaws nevertheless can achieve some great things. And the museum, any museum, in its attempt to chronicle history, cannot entirely escape the biases of its own times.
The history of the museum itself is recent history, shallow time, a mere blip in the cosmic order, a minuscule fraction of humanity’s short time on this planet. What the museum seeks and substantially succeeds to accomplish is to reveal not only the greater scope of human history but the history of life on Earth. The wonder of humanity is that a shallow-time institution, with all its foibles and misdeeds and biases, can in the end tell us something important about years measured in the billions, about Deep Time.
The museum works on
Just this year museum researchers discovered dinosaur fossils buried deep beneath its own parking lot. A museum media release states, “In January, the Museum conducted a geothermal test drilling project to assess the viability of transitioning from natural gas to geothermal energy. At that time, the team took the opportunity to carry out a scientific coring research initiative to help researchers better understand the geology of the Denver Basin. The coring investigation led to the unexpected discovery of a nearly 70 million dinosaur fossil. The partial-bone fossil was found 763 feet below the surface and has been identified as the deepest and oldest dinosaur fossil ever found within the city limits.”
Meanwhile, museum researchers led by Tyler Lyson have returned to North Dakota to try to find more parts of the “Teen Rex” discovered by two young brothers, their cousin, and their father in 2023. The skull of this young T-Rex has spent the last year in a prep lab the museum set up specially for it.
Last year, a museum team traveled to Peru to search late Cretaceous rocks. The museum reports, “After nearly a week of prospecting in marine shales and only finding a few scraps of fossil turtle or fish spines, our team finally cracked the fossil code; we started to discover significant fossils of several different marine animals—fish, turtles, crocodiles and even large marine reptiles. . . . These discoveries were thrilling!”
The museum also has done pivotal work about the aftermath of the asteroid collision, as documented in the Nova documentary, “Rise of the Mammals.”
A museum is a product of its time. That does not diminish its value in helping to reveal to us our place in broader time and the broader world. Denver’s nature museum continues to evolve and to reveal new discoveries about our world. It is, to me, a spiritual place, a place where we can contemplate our humanity and our connections to the broader universe. As Campion said, “A museum of natural history is never finished.”
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
