Slice of History: Nevada State Museum adding ichthyosaur exhibit

A mammoth takes up a lot of space in an exhibit room at the Nevada State Museum & Historical Society.
Photo by Gary Thompson.


Artifacts from the early settlement days of Southern Nevada are on display at the museum.

      To the thousands of people who move into Nevada every year, and Clark County in particular, everything must seem as if it were just built yesterday. In some cases it has.
      But the Nevada State Museum & Historical Society is in the business of showing another, older side to the state with some objects and exhibits dating back millions of years.
      On Oct. 30 the museum in the southwest corner of Lorenzi Park off West Washington Avenue will unveil its latest exhibit, an ichthyosaur that goes back to the Triassic Period, an estimated 190 million years ago.
      The ichthyosaur was a reptile, a contemporary of the dinosaur, and a marine carnivore. The one to be on display "lived in the ocean that covered Nevada in that time period," says museum director Shirl Naegle.
      A skeletal outline of the ichthyosaur will hang on the museum wall, accompanied by a 3-D representation of the creature's skull, and actual fossils from the dig in Berlin will be displayed in glass cases.
      "It's not in a condition where we can put a full mount of it up," Naegle says.
      The display will join other prehistory exhibits covering the early days of Nevada, such as a 13-foot Columbian mammoth, Anasazi Indians and the Lost City archaeological site in Overton and Tule Springs, just north of Las Vegas.
      Other exhibits cover more recent history -- a huge green freight wagon with back wheels as tall as a man from the Old West, early ranching, mining, the creation of Clark County, World War II, atomic testing in the 1950s and the state's mobster period.
      Natural history is also included, detailing the many cacti, plants and animals that live in the region. The current Desert Animals exhibit shows how animals have adapted to the state's climate.
      "We try to bring history a little more alive, to let people experience it," says Naegle, who began working at the museum as an exhibit preparer when it opened in 1982. He later became exhibit director and was named director in 1992.
      At present there are more than 390,000 objects in the collection, which also includes old Nevada newspapers, county records, maps and personal papers of important Nevadans. The museum library, which is open to the public, has microfilm of the Review-Journal starting in the 1930s, the Las Vegas Age (1905-40) and the Pioche Weekly (1872-1904).
      David Millman, the museum's curator of collections, says the newspaper collection is important because "in many ways they are the only way to find out some facts about Las Vegas."
      A photo collection of about 50,000 images is "in demand on a daily basis," Millman says.
      He also oversees a collection of old scripts from the early days of television in Las Vegas, plus some film used in news reports from the 1960s and 1970s on KLAS-TV, Channel 8.
      Naegle says the museum often is offered objects, but "we try to be selective in what we take. We recognize that the objects we do take are important."
      For instance, the current New Acquisitions exhibit features objects from the Pair-A-Dice Club, called the first nightclub on what is now the Las Vegas Strip. It's on display through November.
      While the museum keeps an eye on the past, it also has one on the future, Naegle says, collecting objects for future exhibition.
      "One of the challenges of museum work is being a visionary," he says. "What's going to be important in the future? Collecting encompasses not only the old stuff, but also contemporary objects which are going to be the future's artifacts."
     
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      What: Nevada State Museum & Historical Society
      When: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily
      Where: 700 Twin Lakes Drive
      Tickets: $2