Hooked on Fossils
CURATOR AND GEOLOGY PROFESSOR KATY SMITH DIGS (INTO) THE PAST
The curator of paleontology at the Georgia Southern University Museum has been hooked on Ice Age animals ever since she was a very young girl. “Even in kindergarten I wanted to be a paleontologist,” said Katy Smith, Ph.D. “I don’t remember wanting to be anything else. While growing up in Milwaukee, Wis., my parents took me to the museum a lot and I remember looking at the dinosaurs, and I never grew out of it.”
Visitors to the University’s Museum will see her handiwork in the new exhibit “Tremendous Tuskers,” which Smith developed from the ground up. The display on elephants and their extinct relatives of the Coastal Plain and beyond is her first exhibit since she arrived at Georgia Southern three years ago. The geology professor splits her time at the University between the classroom and the Museum, where her main responsibility is the paleontology collection. Putting together her first exhibit meant assembling the fossils, writing all the text that goes into the display and helping develop the graphics.
Smith is also working on revamping the Museum’s Hall of Natural History and planning her second exhibit for this summer, which will focus on dinosaurs. Last summer she led the team of Georgia Southern professors and undergraduates working on the excavation of a whale fossil embedded in limestone along the banks of the Flint River in Albany, Ga.
According to Smith, the fossil was most likely “an ancient whale known as a Basilosaurus that lived during the late Eocene Epoch 37 to 33 million years ago, when most of Georgia’s Coastal Plain was under the ocean.” The team uncovered seven vertebrae at the site; unfortunately, before the fossilized material could be removed, looters sawed through the rock and took the number one through four vertebrae. “It stinks,” said Smith, as she explained the material would have been the most complete whale fossil ever found in Georgia. She is not giving up on the project though, saying they will return to the site to recover the fifth and sixth vertebrae, which are still in place.
As part of her research mission, Smith believes it is important to create opportunities for students to pursue their interests in paleontology. The professor is collaborating with an undergraduate to analyze mastodon fossils discovered in South Carolina and she is engaged in another project on Georgia’s Ossabaw Island to look for the preserved remains of mastodons there.
“For a long time paleontology, was about digging up as many fossils as you could and naming as many as you could,” Smith said. “However, as time goes on, and new technology develops, we can apply that to studying fossils. For instance, 3D modeling is big right now. It is cool because we can recreate the animal and see how it might have moved.”
Smith said there is a reason why she dedicates a lot of her study to the Coastal Plain. “Most of the time when people look at Coastal Plain science they don’t necessarily think of fossils, but that’s what I think of, and that is what my contribution is to the University’s research as Georgia Southern strives to become a leader in coastal plain science.”
– Sandra Bennett