Prehistoric Champions of Citizen Science

“Let’s say hi to Frank,” said Carlyn Buckler, Ph.D. to an antsy group of first graders as she led them across a room to the Museum of the Earth’s grand finale exhibit. The children met Frank with puzzled expressions and unsure eyes. Ten feet above their heads, Frank’s tusks shoot over the railing in place to keep prying hands away from what Buckler called his “beautifully preserved” skeleton.

“At least I call him Frank,” said Buckler, before she showed the students Frank’s femur, which towered over all of them.

Frank is the Hyde Park mastodon, one of three mastodon skeletons found in Central New York during the last ten years. He roamed present-day Hyde Park during the Quaternary Period, roughly 13,550 years ago. Frank was unearthed in August 1999, accidentally, while the Lozier family of Dutchess County was having their pond deepened. Frank was excavated from August through October 2000, and required more than 340 volunteers and 2000 hours of labor.

Frank is an American mastodon (Mammut americanum), an extinct relative of the modern elephant. Compared to African elephants, American mastodons were smaller, and equipped for the colder conditions with a brown coat of fur. They diverted on the evolutionary path from their elephant descendants 15 million years ago, and thrived on Earth until they went extinct around 10,000 years ago. A combination of human hunting and climate change is the widely accepted reason for the mastodon’s sudden extinction.

The Hyde Park mastodon attracted attention in the paleontological community because, save for a few toes, his entire skeleton was found.

“We try to steer clear of false advertising,” said Buckler, looking up at Frank. “If it’s not a real bone in the display, it’s a much darker color.” Casts of the Hyde Park mastodon have been taken and put on display at other paleontology museums and research centers, like that of the University of Michigan.

In spite of these scientific leaps and bounds, Buckler said, “Science education isn’t what it could be. With the loss of biodiversity and climate change that’s happening, we really need to be doing outreach.”

Frank and the Museum of the Earth are a stop on the Discovery Trail. This partnership of eight learning centers in the Ithaca area, which includes the Johnson Museum of Art, the Cayuga Nature Center and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, ensures hands-on, contextual learning in the arts and sciences for Tompkins County school children.

Discovery Trail is one example of the emerging movement in education and scientific research that Buckler called, “citizen science.”

The Museum of the Earth and the Paleontological Research Institute also head the Mastodon Matrix Project. The project begins when a teacher sends away for matrix kits. Matrix is dirt and debris taken from around a fossil, which is Frank, in the case of this project. Students then sift through the matrices and look for shells, wood, rocks and other unidentifiable matter of interest. The finds are then sent back to the Paleontological Research Institute for further analysis.

Of children who have participated in the Mastodon Matrix Project, Buckler said, “They’re not jaded by 12 years of college. They don’t have a narrow field of study. They’re interested in everything. And they’re really good at segregating the rocks and shells from the dirt.”

“Citizen science gets non-science people directly involved, and gives them some stake in the scientific process,” said Buckler.

The citizen science movement is rapidly expanding in the Ithaca area. Daniel Capps, a doctoral student at Cornell, works on the Fossil Finders Project. This project involves a summer field school for teachers, who pass that knowledge on to their students who, as with the Mastodon Matrix Project, are screening ancient soil for signs of life.

Classrooms that participate in Fossil Finders are looking through matrices from the seas of the Devonian Period, which was from 460 through 360 million years ago. Cornell researchers hope to learn how environmental change affected Devonian sea life through the finds from Fossil Finders students.

“There is some debate about the efficacy of the project because the work is done by school kids. But just from cursory looks at the data, kids find as many things as scientists do. They know how to look and inquire,” said Buckler.

Similar results were seen in the Fossil Finders Project, according to Capps. “The data from students is decent compared to the professionals. And it has big implications. Kids aren’t just reading from textbooks now, they’re working as scientists.”

Buckler added, “Kids get to see themselves as scientists, when they used to only see scientists as white males with white lab coats and glasses.”

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