Time Travel: From Giant Millipedes to Modern Landscapes with New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science
[00:00:00] Matt Celeskey: How do you go from the skeleton that’s in the rock to a living, breathing animal? What did it look like? What could it see? How did it sense its environment? What was it eating? There’s just so many mysteries with every fossil to try to tell its story.
[00:00:14] Spencer Lucas: You know, a woman who worked for the Park Service found part of the skeleton of a predatory reptile.
Well, that was an animal about six feet long, that was a predator. Well, in my mind, you gotta create a whole food chain—that animal couldn’t have, you know, just used Uber Eats or something to get its food back in the Permian.
We need to find that food chain. It’s out there, fossilized. We just haven’t found it.
[00:00:39] Emily Withnall: ¡Bienvenidos! This is Encounter Culture from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. I’m your host and editor of El Palacio Magazine, Emily Withnall.
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[00:00:53] Imagine traveling far back in time. So far that the arid features of New Mexico today, the juniper and cholla and sagebrush, disappear. Imagine traveling back three hundred million years to the Pennsylvanian period. A time in New Mexico long before the dinosaurs showed up.
Back then, while most of the planet was cloaked in ice, New Mexico’s location within the continent of Pangaea was right at the equator. If we could teleport to this time, we would see warm shallow seas and a lush tropical forest. We might see giant salamanders and lizards, and an eight-foot millipede scuttling by.
The New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science doesn’t have a millipede fossil on display in its new Ancient Life exhibition, but it does have a fossilized track pad of giant millipede prints, along with a fabricated six-foot millipede, the curatorial team created to give visitors to the museum the full visceral experience of seeing an invertebrate of that size.
The millipede track pad is just one of three hundred never before seen fossils on display in the museum’s new three thousand-square-foot Bradbury Stamm Construction Hall of Ancient Life. The exhibition opened in early 2025 and showcases life in New Mexico from the Cambrian period, 541 million years ago, to the end of the Permian, 252 million years ago.
Though it can be hard to fully appreciate that scale of time, the fossils on display tell a story of life that persisted through numerous mass extinctions and against all odds.
New Mexico ranks among the top places in the world for fossils and boasts a collection of roughly 150,000 specimens, most of which have been identified and categorized to help tell the story of New Mexico’s vast natural history.
[00:03:08] Some fossils, however, remain a mystery. And as museum Curator of Paleontology, Spencer Lucas points out, there are gaps in the geologic record that make his field excavations and research feel like detective work.
Curator of exhibits, Matt Celeski helps to interpret the research and specimens the paleontology team brings in, and works with exhibition artists to create visual displays and wall text that tell the astounding stories of lobe-finned fish venturing onto land, tree climbing lizards, and ancient sharks.
When I walked through the Ancient Life exhibition for the first time a few months ago, it was hard not to consider how much the planet has transformed over time, and how wildly improbable and incredible it is that specific changes in climate and alterations and evolution following mass extinctions led to humans.
To catch a behind-the-scenes glimpse as the exhibition was being built. Check out our walkthrough video on YouTube @newmexicoculture, and find out how Spencer views mass extinction through the eyes of a paleontologist. As he says,
[00:04:29] Spencer: Extinction is just a normal part of the historical process of how life works on this planet.
You know, there are a few things that are around—there’s some algae and microbes that have probably been a living for billions of years—but if you think about, you know, dinosaurs or some of the animals and plants—they’re all extinct. So, extinction: There’s no shame in extinction. You shouldn’t feel bad if you go extinct.
It’s not a bad thing.
[00:04:57] Emily: In the meantime, if you’d like to experience this kind of awe on a scale of hundreds of millions of years please join us for this conversation.
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[00:05:12] Matt: I am Matt Celeskey. I’m the curator of exhibits at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science. I supervise the exhibitions team. We have a staff of designers, fabricators, painters, sculptors, illustrators, just all kinds of artists and creative folks that keep the exhibits here running, design, develop, and build the new ones, including Ancient Life.
[00:05:35] Emily: So, I’m assuming you have a background in art as well as science?
[00:05:38] Matt: I do, yeah. My degree is in fine art. I was trained as a painter, a printmaker, and sculptor. Got into exhibit design and have been working in zoos and museums for the past thirty years.
[00:05:50] Emily: Oh, wow. And how about you? What does your job entail?
[00:05:53] Spencer: Um, my name is Spencer Lucas.
I’m also at the same museum as Matt. I’m a curator of paleontology. I do scientific research on fossils, which involves, also, going out in field and collecting them. And I also provide scientific support for all of the museum’s, public programs, and in particular, what we’re talking about today is I served as the curator of this Ancient Life Hall that were opening.
So, in addition to having participated in collecting a lot of the fossils that’ll be in the Hall, I worked with exhibits and our educators to pick the fossils that would go in the Hall. And then ultimately, I wrote the first draft of all the text for the Hall.
[00:06:36] Emily: So, when you go out and collect fossils and bring them back, is there a space within the museum where you’re researching them or—?
[00:06:44] Spencer: Right. We have—the main museum building, which everyone’s familiar with, is the building where all the exhibits are—but we have two separate buildings to the east, and one of those buildings is where all the fossil collections are. I have my office and lab—and so that’s where all the fossils are worked on.
[00:07:02] Emily: So, I have had the privilege of seeing the collections and walking through that building. And I know it’s very impressive. So I would love to hear about what makes the museum’s collections so significant.
[00:07:15] Spencer: When the museum was created, it was created by an act of the legislature in the early ’80s.
The Legislative Bill says that one of our purposes is to collect, conserve, and interpret New Mexico’s natural history—and so the collection is a very direct way of meeting that aspect of the mission. Now, New Mexico is an incredible place for fossils. I mean, if you turn the TV on, you look at the Discovery Channel or Nat Geo, you see stories about Mongolia or Montana—New Mexico’s right up there.
It is one of the greatest fossil collecting areas on Earth, and there are a lot of unique fossils from New Mexico that are not found elsewhere. And so the collection here—which now totals about a hundred thousand cataloged fossils—that collection captures a lot of the fossil record of New Mexico, that we have a lot of unique fossils that are not known elsewhere.
And of course, some of these unique fossils are in the—they’re gonna be in the Ancient Life Hall.
[00:08:17] Matt: The interpreting side is where myself and my staff work on.
So having the collections, the actual objects that are subject of research or—I mean, a lot of ’em are just really cool things to look at. So, you know, having that as a resource to figure out how to tell the stories: What can we learn from these? How can we reconstruct what New Mexico was like millions, or hundreds of millions, of years before any people were here?
The collection’s a key part of that. And, you know, being able to work with the scientific staff, Spencer and our collections managers, our fossil preparators, and our educators, to sort of pull those stories out and present them to the public—it’s great to have those objects to work with, and that makes us really unique.
[00:09:04] You know, you go to a lot of museums, there’s a mix of real objects and casts. And, we have a few casts, but we work predominantly with real objects. Yeah, so a cast is, it’s a reproduction of an actual object. For example, a lot of, if you go to a natural history museum and you look at the dinosaur skeletons, it’s extremely complicated to mount the actual bones.
Some museums do it, but it puts the objects at risk. It’s a really delicate procedure. It’s much more flexible to take a mold of the fossils that lets you fill in the gaps for the pieces that are missing, and then cast that mold in a different material, usually like a resin, or a fiberglass-based material.
And then you can put the replica out on display—the cast of the fossil—and keep the original fossil back in collections for study, and to keep it safe. But we like to put the real stuff out on display as much as we can, because, you know, we’re here for the public. We’re holding the fossils really for the people of New Mexico.
[00:10:12] Spencer: Not just for the people of New Mexico. A lot of the fossils we have come from Federal land in the states who are actually holding them in trust for the taxpayers of the whole country. The fact that we have our own collection,a and that we go out and find things and discover new things, puts us in a very unique position. As a museum, we can become a unique destination.
We publish scientific articles about a lot of the fossils we discover, and that science ultimately trickles down into a more public understanding. The exhibit is certainly that, but online, you know, we do a certain amount of marketing or publicity around our discoveries.
So actually, there are people who want to come here and see specific fossils that they can see nowhere else.
About the replica thing: We want to put, as Matt said, real fossils out on display, but we can’t always do it. So, the best example is: our Jurassic Exhibit Hall is on the second floor, and we have the complete skeleton of a dinosaur called Seismosaurus up there, but it’s a cast.
The cast weighs about a ton—the plastic replica. We don’t have all the bones of the animal, but just the backbone alone. We couldn’t put it on display. It weighs 13,000 pounds. We talked to a structural engineer and he said, “Hey, that second floor isn’t going to support it.” And so, there are logistical reasons too, why we can’t always put everything out on display.
[00:11:36] Emily: Yeah, wow! I’d love to ask you what it’s like to kind of translate what might be very dense science, I’m imagining, sometimes, into something that the general public can understand.
[00:11:52] Spencer: We are able to do that because, first we have the scientists like me, who do the actual research. We have a staff of educators. And we also have the exhibit staff.
So, if you were to take the example of this Ancient Life exhibit, I wrote a draft of all the texts that we thought would go in the exhibit. And I try to not make it overly technical, but since I am a technical person, I sometimes don’t succeed. Our educators and our exhibits people check, and read, and edit what I write, so that we produce something that—I want to believe—that almost all our script is intelligible to ten-year-olds, say, middle school, high school-age kids.
[00:12:34] Matt: Yeah. And, of course we have a lot of, you know, like I mentioned, talented artists in the exhibits team. So we’ve got stuff for the people that might not be able to get all the details from the text.
We’ve reconstructed dozens of Paleozoic animals, these ancient life animals and plants that, uh, people will see their fossils. So there’ll be, you know, pictures, different types of interpretation and interactives that are used to interpret the fossils in different ways for different types of learning, and different levels of learning.
So: something in there for everyone, qe hope.
[00:13:09] Spencer: Everything we do with it is for education, so even the technical writing—I’m just educating other PhDs about the fossils we have. And then when I say it trickles down, it’ll appear in textbooks, popular books, and of course exhibits like this one.
And what’s really neat to me is just that—that, you know, I’ll write a technical article—and you’re right, they’re very technical. Maybe a hundred, two hundred people worldwide will read that article and really understand it.
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We have about a quarter million visitors come to this museum every year. So when we put an exhibit up like this one, within a matter of four or five years, a million people will have seen it.
So in terms of the impact of the science, it’s huge to get it into that public sphere through exhibition.
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[00:14:09] Emily: I would love to know if you have any particular favorite pieces in the collections, or pieces that are really unique, or unusual.
[00:14:19] Spencer: Oh yeah. Well, you know, my two favorites are two of the reptile fossils that are in the exhibit that we discovered, and we described and named. One of them is called Gordodon. It’s this sail-backed reptile that was one of the earliest rather specialized plant eaters, and it was found down near Alamogordo.
But its name actually comes from the fact that it has two big fat teeth at the front of its mouth. So “gordo” is fat, “odontos” is tooth, although it turned out that it could also be construed as naming it after Alamogordo. And a few years ago after we published it, the City of Alamogordo, the Mayor, proclaimed Gordodon Day.
I went down to Alamogordo and we took the fossil to the Space History Museum, which is our sister museum in DCA, and we had an event—and then it was on display for six months. So Gordodon’s a big favorite of mine.
Another one is an animal called Eoscansor. And Eoscansor is actually even more of a favorite ’cause I’ve always liked small fossils more than big fossils.
Eoscansor is just a little, few inches long, lizard-like reptile that we found in Northern New Mexico, and it’s the oldest tree climbing reptile known. So this is an animal that lived about 305 million years ago. It was a little like a modern lizard that would climb in trees, probably hunting insects and things like that.
And that’s yet another totally unique fossil that’s going to be in the exhibit. Matt probably likes those too, as well. (Emily chuckles)
But you might have other favorites.
[00:15:50] Matt: Right, yeah—I’ve worked with Spencer on those fossils, you know, working on reconstructing the animals. So those are a lot of fun.
I think one of the other big favorites I have and that’s gonna be in the exhibit is, another unique fossil hasn’t been found anywhere but New Mexico. It’s called Dracopristis. And that is a complete shark skeleton preserved from a quarry that’s just southeast of Albuquerque. So you get in a car, twenty-five minutes, you could probably be pretty close to where this animal was found, and it’s one of the biggest fossils we’re putting into the exhibit.
Like I said, it’s a complete shark from snout to tail, which is very rare. Sharks don’t often fossilize. Most of their skeletons or cartilage, so it takes very unique conditions for them to be preserved in the fossil record. And this one is really unique. It’s got some really weird big spines on its back, and a bunch of unusual, sharp cusped teeth in its mouth.
And it’s really exciting to be able to put that on display for people. We haven’t had the whole thing out on display ever before, and honestly that’s true for a lot of the fossils in this exhibit. Probably less than ten percent of what we’re putting out on display has ever been on display before.
So, pretty exciting to, you know, give these things their debut.
[00:17:16] Emily: Yeah. Yeah. I’m so excited to see it. I’m curious, also, about the way that you decide what fossils from the collection, whether it’s Ancient Life or any other exhibition, which ones actually get shown, and which ones maybe you can’t show for various reasons.
[00:17:33] Spencer: Every exhibit has a big idea. So you start out by saying, “Okay, we’re gonna build this exhibit hall, and everybody who sees it is gonna learn this. And basically this Hall is gonna teach people about all the different environments that existed in the Paleozoic.”
So then within that big idea, you the team, the curator, the exhibitors, the educators—come up with a set of what might be called stories. What are the things we’re going to teach the public about the Paleozoic? And we base that on what we already know about the Paleozoic globally, and in New Mexico. So then we come up with this list of stories or teaching elements, if you will.
And from that, we pick the fossils that will go on display. And then of course, as Matt said through the work of a wonderful group of artists—not only drawing, painting, sculpting—we’re able to bring those animals and plants to life.
[00:18:27] Matt: Some of the fossils, you know, they speak for themselves. They’re kind of like superstars—key pieces that we’re going to craft the exhibit around.
You know, a complete six-foot-long, seven-foot-long, shark—that’s going to be one. We’ve got a track slab that contains the footprints that were left by a giant millipede, or millipede relative, about 300 million years ago, that we knew was going to go in.
Some of the animals Spencer mentioned: Gordodon, Eoscansor—these are not only important scientifically and tell real environmental stories about what was happening, but they’re beautiful fossils to look at. So those are the easy ones. It’s then, like Spencer was saying, we have the stories that we know we want to tell to support that big idea of the exhibit.
What was New Mexico like between 250 and you know, 540 million years ago? We’ve got these environments. What fossils can we use to show what the environments were like? How do you tell people that we know that there was a tropical sea across the southern part of the state in the Devonian period, or a giant sponge reef in the beginning of the Permian?
Most of the stuff we found came from our collections.
[00:19:40] Spencer: Well, in fact, the, the Hall is gonna have over three hundred real fossils from our collection.
[00:19:45] Matt: And yeah, when, when we say that we’re adding about three hundred fossils to this exhibit, I’m pretty sure that this exhibit is going to double the number of fossils that we put on display.
[00:19:57] Emily: How many fossils do you have in your collections?
[00:20:00] Spencer: The whole collection is under about a hundred thousand, catalog numbers, but sometimes, we’ll, you know, we’ll have ten shells and we’ll catalog them together. So we actually don’t know the exact number, but we think we have about 150,000 fossils.
[00:20:16] Emily: Wow. Are there fossils that can’t be on display for some reason, that you really like or that maybe you don’t know as much as you want to about yet, like maybe there’s something interesting or intriguing in collections?
[00:20:31] Spencer: We do have some dinosaur bones that are mildly radioactive.
[00:20:36] Emily: Oh!
[00:20:36] Spencer: And they’re not radioactive enough to be dangerous in the collection, but we don’t want to put them on display because we’re just concerned. Again, they’re probably not dangerous, but we’re concerned that the perception that we’re putting radioactive material on display would not be a good one.
Yeah. Some of the fossils we don’t understand, and we’re not sure even what they are, but that alone doesn’t prevent us from putting them on display. For example, one of the fossils that’ll be in this Hall is this kind of circular structure with little chambers in it. And it was originally thought to be a fossil millipede, but it’s definitely not that.
And we had a scientific meeting here about twenty years ago, and I showed that fossil to a bunch of experts. Including myself, you could say, and nobody was sure what it was. We couldn’t agree. What we think it is, is some sort of an egg chamber for some sort of insect, maybe, but we’re not a hundred percent sure and the label says that.
So just because, you know—I would say the fossils that aren’t going to go on display are the ones that are so incomplete, or maybe damaged, that they have scientific value, but they’re going to be very, very difficult for the visitor to understand. And if we have better, if we have more complete, say, fossil bones or whatever, we’ll put them out on display, not the damaged or incomplete material.
[00:22:00] Matt: Yeah, I mean, there’s quite a range of different types of fossils that are going to be displayed in different ways. So, some will be out and touchable. We’ve got a really big, petrified log that’s literally rock-solid and people will be able to put their hands on it and feel what a two-hundred fifty million-year-old tree trunk feels like—down to things that are just on the most fragile, thin slabs of shale, that if they get handled too much, they will break apart.
So we’re being very careful about how we’re handling it and our fossil preparation staff has been able to kind of reinforce them as much as possible. We’re putting them in, in these fabric lined foam cradles so that they can be out on display safely and visitors can see them.
[00:22:51] Spencer: If I were to give you a tour, I would say to you, “Every fossil in the collection in theory, can go on display.”
Many that are in the collection now have been on display. The displays have changed. They’ve been retired, they’re back in the collection, and I don’t doubt that in twenty years, if I come back here, I will see some fossils on display that are now in the collection.
[00:23:13] Matt: It all depends on the stories you want to tell, but I think one of the strengths of this team is that we’ve worked to find some more interesting stories to talk about with Ancient Life, like these fossil mysteries—like that possible insect egg chamber—or, there’s a kind of a mysterious marine fossil called a receptaculitid that we’re putting out and we’re labeling it, “This is a fossil mystery.”
Scientists are still debating what this actually preserves, and you know, new discoveries, new interpretations—the work of future scientists is going to continue to move our understanding forward. So it’s not like we’re presenting a story that everything is known. And this is all said and done, this is the complete story of New Mexico’s ancient life.
This is, you know, where we’re at now, and there’s opportunities for you to contribute in the future.
[00:24:06] Spencer: I think most people realize that scientists don’t know everything, although some scientists pretend like they do. In paleontology, we certainly don’t know everything.
We’re always discovering new fossils. It’s one of the joys of paleontology. You think you know something or you think you understand something, and in comes a new fossil and it changes understanding. So, one of the things the Hall will convey is just that: the fact that we really don’t know everything, like Matt said.
We’re showing you a snapshot, if you will, of what we know now about New Mexico between about five hundred and two-fifty million—but I guarantee in twenty years or fifty years, we’ll know more, and we’ll know some different things.
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And that’s why when you build exhibits around science, you do have to periodically refresh them or renovate them, in order to reflect the changing understanding of the science.
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[00:25:01] Emily: I grew up going to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science and have fond memories of walking on the lava floor and sleeping among the dinosaurs with my Girl Scout troop. The museum is a New Mexico favorite for a reason.
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I may be just a little biased, but if you love New Mexico, you’ll love El Palacio. Subscribe at elpalacio.org/subscribe.
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[00:26:53] Emily: There is currently, when listeners hear this episode, a article in the spring issue of El Palacio Magazine about Ancient Life, and when I first read the draft that the writer sent me, I got this sense of vertigo because it covered so much time, and trying to wrap my brain around that much time was really difficult.
So what are some of the challenges for you in terms of interpreting that much time? And do you also struggle with that? (laughs) Like, like wrapping your brain around how old the Earth is and how many transformations it’s undergone?
[00:27:39] Matt: Yes, I’ll, I’ll say yes to all that. I mean, it’s a big story, you know—like if you were to go from all the other galleries, the time that they cover in our museum put together, that’s equivalent to the time that we’re covering in this Hall.
The Paleozoic is a huge amount of time, and it gets kind of short shrift because, you know, people think of natural history museums, they think of the dinosaurs. They want to see the big animals. And a lot of the things that were running around before that were smaller. There were still plenty of toothy ones, and this is actually when teeth came around, but you know, it takes a lot to interpret the things because they’re not as familiar.
Most people don’t go into a museum with an understanding of what a placoderm is, or a Eupelycosaur or some of these other terms that we’re having to introduce people to. Just the number of stories, the number of environments has been a major challenge in, you know, how do we condense this all into three thousand square feet?
I mean, that was a huge part of the development of this exhibit early on. We sat down around a table, for—we just had three days of solid meetings, to kind of download the information from Spencer about New Mexico’s Paleozoic, and then figure out, how are we going to structure a story that we could build an exhibit around.
I’m pretty confident we’ll pull it off, but I guess the visitors will let us know when they come in, in a couple weeks.
[00:29:06] Spencer: Yeah, unlike the other halls, like if you look at our Jurassic Hall, that hall is really only covering about fifty million years of Earth history, and almost all the fossils in that hall are dinosaurs.
This Hall is covering two hundred fifty million-plus years. It’s a long span of time, and the fossils range from, you know, plants and footprints to bones. It’s, it is a very complicated Hall compared to our other exhibit halls. But I think what we did, of course, is our theme for our fossil exhibits is the idea of walking through time.
So one of the things that helped us organize it is this time vector. So when you enter the hall, you enter it around five hundred million, and if you follow the flow of the hall, you will progress through it, through all the time periods and the different environments and fossils ‘til you get to the end of the Paleozoic at two fifty, and of course you can do it.
You can come in at the end and work your way back to the beginning.
[00:30:03] Emily: Matt just said that they had to download all the information about the Paleozoic from you. Do you just carry all this time around with in your head?
[00:30:13] Spencer: Well, I, no, but I’ve worked here since 1988, if you can believe that. Yeah, I was a baby when I was hired, but anyway.
Um. I’ve worked on the Paleozoic in New Mexico since the 1990s, so I have a lot of experience. I’ve, I would say I’ve probably read most of the science that’s been published on the Paleozoic. I’ve collected a lot of the fossils. I’ve worked with other scientists who have skills.
I don’t work, for example, on fossil plants. I’ve been able to work with scientists who are experts. So, all that knowledge I have, has come about in about twenty-five to thirty years—both experience in the field, experience with the fossils, reading, and also benefiting from my collaborators.
[00:30:56] Emily: One of the other things about this article in the spring issue of El Palacio is that it did read a lot of times like a detective story.
So I’m curious if there are interesting mysteries or things that, that you are pursuing in your research or are curious about that are like, gaps, or missing information from the Paleozoic Era.
[00:31:20] Spencer: One of the things that’s in this exhibit is something we literally discovered like three years ago. So, during a part of what we call Permian time, say at about two seventy or two eighty million, we know the first deserts appeared in New Mexico.
These are the oldest deserts we know of, and the conventional thinking for many, many years by geologists and paleontologists was there aren’t going to be any fossils in these rocks that formed into deserts. Why? Because very little lived in the deserts and desert environments tend not to preserve fossils.
But a couple of years ago, one of my volunteers found near Socorro, he found what we call an oasis, a wet lake deposit that was in the desert, full of fossil plants, full of footprints, and other trackways. So, one of the things that I’m intrigued by, and I think the exhibit, is how much life will we really discover in that desert?
You know, I don’t think that desert was as barren a place as many people thought. And now we’re starting to see that. And, and one other thing that happened is, a woman who worked for the Park Service found part of the skeleton of a predatory reptile in a different place, not at the oasis, in those desert deposits.
Well, that was an animal about six feet long that was a predator. Well, in my mind, you gotta create a whole food chain—that animal couldn’t have, you know, just used Uber Eats or something to get its food back in the Permian. So there had to be an entire food chain to feed that animal.
We need to find that food chain. It’s out there, fossilized. We just haven’t found it.
[00:32:56] Emily: That is so exciting. This is not on my list of questions, but can I change professions? Is it too late? (laughs)
So, um, are there any mysteries that you’re particularly interested in?
[00:33:11] Matt: The biggest mystery you know, I—I don’t just do exhibit work. I’m also a Paleo artist, which is—and some of my staff are as well—they’re people that really get into the, you know, trying to figure out what these ancient animals and plants and environments looked like, and create artwork to reconstruct them.
So, it’s all the mysteries, right? Like even the best fossil is going to have so many missing information. How do you go from the skeleton that’s in the rock to a living, breathing animal? What pieces do you need to fill in for that?
So, for example, the, one of the animals that we started talking about Gordodon, it’s this weird fat-toothed sail-backed animal, uh, found only in New Mexico. It was cruising around Alamogordo. We have a beautiful fossil of the front half of it. We can try to piece in the missing pieces and reconstruct the whole animal.
And yeah: What did it look like? What colors were it? What could it see? How did it sense its environment? What was it eating?
There’s just so many mysteries with every fossil to try to tell its story.
That’s what captivates me, is working with these artists to try to understand how we can present, you know, a vision of what the world was like back in the Paleozoic in a way that they can feel transported there.
[00:34:36] Emily: For any young people who might be interested in either paleontology or exhibition design, what paths might they take to get to those professions?
[00:34:48] Spencer: Hmm. Well, the paleontology is easier. I mean, if you want to be a professional paleontologist like me, you’re going to definitely have to go to college, and professional scientists almost always have PhDs.
My PhD is in geology because paleontology is the intersection of biology and geology. But there are plenty of paleontologists who have PhDs in biology, and there are even some paleontologists who have PhDs in anthropology, ’cause they’re mostly interested in things like human evolution.
So what I tell ’em, if young people come to the museum and they say, “I want to be a paleontologist,” Well, the answer is, stay in school and get ready for about ten years of college.
(everyone chuckles)
[00:35:29] Matt: Um, on the exhibit side of things, there’s probably a few more different paths. Most of the people that work in exhibits, have some sort of, you know, like creative background. They’re, they’re artists, or they’re craftspeople, or they’re cabinet makers, or they’re welders. Figuring out the skills that you’re excited to do, if you have any kind of artistic background or practice—just, you know, keep working at that.
Art school can be a great resource, but, you know, probably an even better resource is, see if you can volunteer with an exhibits department. That’s honestly how I got started. I was in college, going to art school, but I did an internship with an exhibit department in a zoo and that sort of led me on this path.
It’s a great way to be creative, but work with a much bigger team. You know, I’m here working with paleontologists like Spencer. I’m working with educators, and writers, and photographers, and sculptors, and muralists, and all these people that bring all their skills together to make these stories come alive.
So, find which parts of the story you’re interested in telling, and which skills that you can figure out how to tell it with. And if you’re persistent, there’s usually a way you could find a way into working on an exhibits team.
[00:36:53] Spencer: Well, and then to hit on something he said, realize too that, you know, he and I only represent two skill sets for the exhibit.
We have carpenters, electricians, welders. I mean, you can work on exhibits as a carpenter.
[00:37:07] Matt: Yeah.
[00:37:07] Spencer: You know, and in reality this exhibit probably tapped into—just about everybody who works in this building did something for this exhibit. Even the, you know, the accountants, the, the public information officer, these people actually worked on this exhibit, in addition to all the exhibit staff, the scientists, the educators.
And so, there’s a lot of room in museum exhibition for a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of different skills, and we need that. Yeah. I mean, I don’t weld. I don’t think Matt does either.
[00:37:39] Matt: Couldn’t start.
[00:37:39] Spencer: But welding was essential to the exhibit. And we have a member of our staff who’s quite a good welder, who did that work.
[00:37:46] Matt: This museum, like most museums, relies very much on volunteers. They’re a key part to everything we do. And so, there’s opportunities there. If people are interested in taking part in, in the museums in a way that’s a little more involved than, you know, buying your ticket and coming in and seeing it, there’s opportunities to contribute, you know, from working in collections, to working on exhibits, to helping interpret stuff on the floor for the visitors that come in.
(music fades in)
[00:38:23] Emily: This is not on my list, but if you could each time travel back to one of these periods, what would you choose?
[00:38:31] Spencer: Oh, I love all time periods of the past, but right now my favorite time period is the Permian.
[00:38:36] Emily: Okay.
[00:38:37] Spencer: So I would go back to the Permian, I would go back to the early Permian when Gordodon lived, that that would be my choice.
And I would tell you that I know from the geology research that’s been done that at the time, New Mexico was kind of like this archipelago of islands. There were mountains here, they’re called the Ancestral Rockies. There were rivers flowing from these mountains into some of the basins. There were shallow seas, and at the time, New Mexico was pretty darn close to smack dab on the equator.
Way out in the west, all the continents were amalgamated to make one, we call it a super continent. And so, in my mind, I would like to go there. I like warm weather, great beach time, unless you got attacked by some ten-foot-long shark, I guess. (Emily laughs)
But, um, yeah, I would, I would love to go back to the Permian.
That’s my choice today, but in another year I might want to go back to a different time period.
[00:39:30] Emily: Okay. All right. (laughs)
[00:39:32] Matt: Yeah. Permian’s a good one, I think. I’ll say the period right before that, which is the Pennsylvanian—it was the beginning of that coalescing of that supercontinent. We’ve got some tropical forests and around New Mexico, um, the giant bugs were still around, but they were also living with, you know, some of the ancestors of animals like Gordodon and, and things like that, which are actually kind of like some of our closest relatives back then.
So what did our ancestors look like? Three hundred million years ago, how, how scaly were they? Is there, is there any indication we’re starting to get fur? Is there, you know, what is their behavior like? You know, so many questions, even though we’ve got like great skeletons and fossils and footprints dialing in the details of how are they moving around, how are they interacting with each other and their environments.
You know, what are the critters that are out there that we’ve never seen fossils of? Even the best deposits, like some of the great fossil sites that we’re showcasing here. I would guess what, maybe, maybe we know only ten percent of the fauna that lived in a given place.
[00:40:48] Spencer: Oh, I’d guess more like two percent. We’re really ignorant of a lot of the fossil record because we, people have really only been studying fossils for about two hundred years.
And on one hand, that may sound like a lot of time, but it really isn’t considering how vast the fossil record is. And that’s why we’re able to go out and discover new kinds of animals and plants fairly frequently because we really haven’t yet captured a complete understanding of the history of life.
[00:41:20] Emily: How often do you add to the collection?
[00:41:24] Spencer: Well, you’re, you’re not just talking about me collecting. Now we have three paleontology curators who all collect. We have research associates, who are people who collect and work with us, and then we have volunteers, and we even have worked with UNM students. So, I’m going to guess that, I mean, you could do the math.
When I came here in ’88, there were essentially no fossils in the collection.
[00:41:47] Emily: Oh, wow.
[00:41:48] Spencer: Now there’s a hundred thousand catalog numbers in a little less than forty years. So we’re bringing in a couple of three thousand, probably, fossils on average, a year.
[00:41:57] Emily: A year! Do you have space? Are you gonna have to expand? (laughs)
[00:42:00] Spencer: Well, we have space now. We haven’t filled the space we have, but yeah, there could come a point.
(music begins to fade in to background)
But, I know the leadership in DCA will swoop down from Santa Fe and provide us with all the space we’ll ever need.
[00:42:14] Emily: Okay. (laughs) That’s great.
(futuristic robotic music gets louder)
[00:42:28] Emily: You both talked about like choosing the stories, but how do you choose the stories you want to tell based on how much time this museum covers?
[00:42:38] Spencer: Well, I think you have to look at what we know about the history of life to begin with. So, for example, in the Paleozoic, there are some really important stories Matt mentioned, that teeth evolved, but also one of the biggest things that happened is animals actually, and plants came onto land.
You know, there was a point where everything was pretty much living in the sea and then it came onto land. So those sort of big stories that we, we know we want those in the Hall because they are important, basic knowledge about the whole Paleozoic. And then of course we try to figure out how might New Mexico’s fossils and rocks fit into those stories.
That’s one level. Then of course, to me, there’s the uniquely New Mexican stories. So a good example is we know that New Mexico was covered by seas and many times during the Paleozoic, but, we know that all those older seas, the seas before about maybe three hundred fifty million were all confined to the southern part of the state.
So when you talk about sea and land and those older time periods, you’re really talking about Northern New Mexico, and by that I mean really from Truth or Consequences, north, pretty much being land and Southern New Mexico being sea. And we want to tell those stories too, because we are the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science.
I always say you can go to the American Museum of Natural History, or the Smithsonian, Carnegie. You can go to the big museum—you’re not going to see New Mexico-specific stories like you see here. We’re here to tell you the history of this wonderful place.
[00:44:16] Emily: So, if there was one or two main takeaways that you hope visitors take from Ancient Life, what would those be?
[00:44:24] Matt: The key thing I’d want people to appreciate is the, just the richness of really, really deep history that, you know, people think of New Mexico, they think of the, the historical aspect of it, the Wild West and the Spanish colonial and the Indigenous people that were here. But back before all that, we’ve got records of an outstanding, rich history from all corners of our state.
This exhibit goes from Southern New Mexico to Northern New Mexico, back again. There’s great stuff to be found, uh, all across the state.
[00:45:07] Spencer: One thing I think we all want the exhibit to show people is this kaleidoscope of different environments that existed in New Mexico during the Paleozoic.
And to me, I see New Mexico now as we all do, as basically a high desert very far away from the sea. Well north of the Equator. And to think that if you go back three hundred million years ago, New Mexico was on the Equator. It was an archipelago of islands surrounded by shallow, tropical seas. There were jungles on the islands and all these strange and totally extinct animals and plants lived here.
So, I want that time travel-type aspect. I want that Hall to take the visitor back, and to make the visitor realize how much things have changed, and how much they will continue to change. A lot of people will sit there and say, “Oh, you know, the Earth is pretty permanent and stable,” and all that.
But from a geologist-paleontologist point of view, the Earth is very dynamic. It’s always changing. The continents are moving now. Animals and plants are going extinct, first appearing, being successful, being not so successful. And that’s the way it’s been, for hundreds of millions of years. And we capture that here in New Mexico with these Paleozoic fossils and the exhibit.
[00:46:26] Emily: Yeah, I mean, one of the things I was struck by in reading the article about the exhibit is, how many mass extinctions there have been, right?
It just made me think a lot about how it happens that we are here. (laughs)
[00:46:41] Spencer: Well, and you know, I’m a old paleontologist. I’m a bit cynical and jaded. But I still feel a sense of wonder when I see a fossil that’s three hundred million years old, say, and I think to myself, “That animal or that plant lived three hundred million years ago and here is part of its body, or an impression of its body, or whatever to remind us.”
I mean, the Earth, Mother Nature, keeps her own books. She records the history of life on this planet. And what we are here to do, not just the paleontologists, but the artists and the educators, is we’re trying to read that book and interpret it and present it to the citizens in New Mexico and anybody else who will come here.
[music increases in volume briefly before fading away]
[00:47:26] Emily: If you’d like to learn more about ancient life in New Mexico, be sure to visit the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science to see the exhibition for yourself. For planning purposes, please note that the museum will be undergoing some much-needed renovations. So, visit before August if you can, or catch the exhibition in early 2026 when renovations are complete.
And be sure to check out the article by Tamara Enz about ancient life in New Mexico in the Spring 2025 issue of El Palacio. We’ll provide a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
[music fades into theme music and closing credits]
[00:48:14] Emily: Encounter Culture is a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
Our producer is Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios.
This season is produced and edited by Andrea Klunder and Alex Riegler with additional editing by Monica Braine.
Our recording engineers are Collin Ungerleider and Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe.
Technical direction and post-production audio by Edwin R. Ruiz.
Our executive producer is Daniel Zillmann.
Thank you to New Mexico artist “El Brujo” D’Santi Nava for our theme music.
For a full transcript and show notes, visit podcast.nmculture.org or click the link in the episode description in your listening app.
I’m your host, Emily Withnall.
The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs is your guide to the state’s entire family of museums, historic sites, and cultural institutions. From Native treasures to space exploration, world-class folk art to ancient dinosaurs, our favorite way to fully explore is with the New Mexico CulturePass. To see everywhere CulturePass is accepted and reserve yours today, visit nmculture.org/visit/culturepass.
And if you love New Mexico, you’ll love El Palacio Magazine. Subscribe at elpalacio.org.
Thank you for listening, and if you learned something new, send this episode to a friend or share it on social media. We love celebrating the cultures of New Mexico together.
[theme music fades out]