The Paleontological Research Institution: The First 75 Years

By Warren D. Allmon

 

Beginnings (1895-1952)

 

                In founding their University, Ezra Cornell and his partner, Andrew Dixon White, knew that they needed the basics: buildings, a library, a faculty. It is remarkable that they also thought it essential to have a fossil collection. In 1868, just after the University opened, it purchased the large fossil collection of Col. Ezekiel Jewett (1791-1897) of Albany for $10,000; The Jewett Collection. To this collection were added substantial new material and as a result, by the 1890s Cornell had a large and excellent collection of fossils and an international reputation in paleontology.

                Into this promising setting stepped a young Gilbert Harris in the fall of 1882. Harris was born on October 2, 1864 near Jamestown, in far-western New York State. He graduated from Cornell with his Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1886. After working for several state geological surveys and the United States Geological Survey, Harris returned to Cornell as a professor of geology in 1895. He never received a doctoral degree.

                Over the next 40 years, Harris established himself as one of the most important American invertebrate paleontologists of his generation. Although he was one of the first true petroleum geologists, Harris' real passion was fossil mollusks - clams and snails - of the Cenozoic Era, especially in the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coastal plains. By the end of his life, Harris had published a foot-tall stack of major taxonomic works, which still today form the basis of understanding of these abundant and well-preserved fossils.

                Harris' long career at Cornell was marked by remarkable levels of both achievement and controversy. His research along the coastal plains, and also in the Caribbean and Central and northern South America, resulted in the assembling of an enormous collection of fossil specimens, which joined the already-large Cornell collections packed into the rooms and hallways of McGraw Hall. Frustrated at delays in getting some of his own research published, Harris also established his own scientific printing enterprise, founding his own journal - Bulletins of American Paleontology - in 1895, and printing it himself on a press also located in McGraw.

                As a professor, Harris was remembered as a "wonderfully bad" teacher of undergraduates, but an inspiring mentor to advanced students who showed the same single-minded passion for paleontology that he did. The attention he paid his chosen students obviously had an effect, for many of them went on to noteworthy careers in paleontology and geology, in both academia and the oil business. Many of these individuals remembered their former professor as among the most important influences on their lives, and they maintained a fierce loyalty to him and - even after Harris' death - to the little institution he would eventually found.

                But Harris could also be a stubborn, vain, and contrary professional colleague. For much or most of his time at Cornell, Harris clearly felt the he never received the appropriate level of professional respect from the University for his accomplishments. On top of this was what later generations would call "conflict of interest". For much of his career, Harris was not only a Cornell professor but also a frequent paid consultant to oil companies. These relationships led to a variety of entanglements, one of which in the 1920s resulted in the withdrawal of a promised major cash gift to Cornell. Needless to say, this did not endear Harris to the University administration.

                Thus, as he began to think about retirement in the late 1920s, Harris' mind was filled with a mixture of resentment over perceived mistreatment and legitimate concern about the fate of his collection and printing operation. And so, in early 1932, Harris drew up a charter and bylaws for an independent institution and deeded to it a small plot of land adjacent to his home, just behind Cornell's North Campus. On June 28, 1932, Harris held a simple but formal ceremony with family, friends, and former students to lay the cornerstone for the first PRI building.

                Harris laid out high scientific standards for his little organization and, together with his large collections and widely respected journals, this established PRI's reputation in the scientific research community. Significantly, however, Harris did not include any broader public mission for the Institution. It was envisioned as -- and for decades largely remained - an enclave for Harris and people like him, who wanted to study fossils. Just as importantly, Harris left no comprehensive notion of just how his new enterprise would be supported financially. He seems to have believed that if everyone simply believed as he did, it would succeed. PRI was initially funded largely by Harris himself, with some small contributions from former students and friends. This changed significantly only in 1951 when oil company micropaleontologist Helen Jeanne Plummer in her will left PRI her collections, library, and a significant bequest that became the core of the modest endowment that would allow PRI to survive over the next 40 years.

                Harris remained characteristically active almost to the end. He was personally involved in printing his journals until the last three years of his life, and his last scientific paper was published just a few months before he died on December 4, 1952..

 

The Katherine Palmer Years (1952-1970)

 

                Katherine Evangeline Hinton Van Winkle was born on February 4, 1895 in Oakville, Washington. In 1918, she received her bachelor's degree from the University of Washington, where she studied under the great invertebrate paleontologist Charles Weaver. Weaver "sent" her to Cornell to study under Harris, with the intention that she would return to Washington, ultimately to replace him at the University. But in Ithaca, she met Ephraim Laurance Palmer (1888-1970), Professor of Rural Education and Nature Study at Cornell, and, she later said, she "never went back to do what I was supposed to do in Washington". The Palmers were married on December 24, 1921.

                Katherine Palmer received her PhD under Harris at Cornell in 1925. Although she never held a full-time permanent paid position in the field outside of PRI, she went on to become one of the most accomplished women paleontologists in history, publishing widely in the paleontology and taxonomy of Cenozoic mollusks and becoming the first woman to receive American paleontology's highest honor, the Paleontological Society Medal, in 1972.

                At the April 1952 Board meeting, Katherine Palmer was officially appointed Director of PRI, succeeding Harris, at an annual salary of $4,000.

                The 1950s and 60s were years of great productivity and growth for the organization, with much activity in publications, collections, research, and even occasional informal educational presentations to student and community groups. In 1960 a catalogue of the most valuable part of the collections, the "type and figured specimens" (the name-bearing specimens published in the scientific literature), was published, making PRI one of the few large U.S. invertebrate fossil type collections with a complete published catalog. This further strengthened PRI's credentials as a major research resource among professional paleontologists around the world.

                Money remained very tight. Palmer repeatedly reminded the Trustees that the income from the Plummer endowment was insufficient for ongoing operations and that additional financial support was required. As so often in PRI history, the Board suggested that the petroleum industry be approached for assistance. Over the next 30 years, a number of oil companies would indeed make modest contributions to PRI, but the industry never came to the Institution's aid the way so many Board members over so many years hoped and suggested it should or would.

                By the late 1950s, growth of the collections and activity was making the little PRI building increasingly cramped, but no plan could be successfully developed for expanding the existing facility. It took until 1965 to find the answer: a large stone building on Ithaca's West Hill, across Cayuga Lake from Cornell. The 10,000 square-foot tudor-style structure had been built in 1926-27 as an orphanage by a fraternal organization, the International Order of Odd Fellows. PRI purchased the building and 6.3 acres for $80,000, the funds coming from gifts from trustees and other friends, an interest-free loan from a trustee, and a mortgage from Tompkins County Trust Company. By the end of 1969 the move to West Hill was completed.

                Although the focus of PRI continued to be publication, and to a lesser degree maintenance of collections, the new building also for the first time allowed an area to be devoted solely to public education. In a 600 square-foot room on the first floor, Palmer set up what she came to call the "mini-museum". This space, she wrote in her 1972 Director's Report, "with varying exhibits of fossils and Recent plants and animals is doing yeoman service to the schools, clubs, and individuals..."

                In 1970 and 1971, gifts and bequests from two former Harris students, Monroe G. Cheney and Floyd Hodson, brought the PRI endowment to around $600,000. These funds allowed PRI to persist, but just barely.

 

Transition (1970-1981)

 

                At the October 10, 1970 PRI Board meeting, Katherine Palmer officially announced her desire to retire as Director, but without naming a date. She was 75 years old, and wanted to devote more time to her research (her last technical paper was published in 1979). For her successor, Palmer said, she would prefer "a young man who would be not only professionally competent, but burning to make the Institution his life-work."

                The issue of a successor to Palmer as Director became a central focus of concern for PRI for the next decade. Exactly how to go about replacing the individual who - in addition to being there at the beginning as a Founding Member and Life Trustee - had almost literally been PRI for twenty years was obviously not clear to the Board. At the April 10, 1971 Board meeting, for example, there was, according to the minutes, "no discussion of the matter of a new director," because, as one Trustee put it, there was "no use of such a discussion inasmuch as there were no funds".

                By late 1974, however, the settling of the Hodson bequest allowed the Board to hire David W. Kirtley as Assistant Director for a period of 12-18 months "to share the Director's work and particularly to raise funds". Kirtley had worked as a petroleum geologist in Oklahoma and Texas, and then received his PhD in geology and paleontology from Florida State University in 1974. He thus appeared to have an ideal background for PRI. Over the next 18 months Kirtley reported his progress in seeking major funding. At the April 10, 1976 Board meeting, however, something had changed, and Kirtley abruptly said that he would not work past June 30 under the terms of his current contract. What exactly had happened to precipitate Kirtley's demand is not clear, but over the next two months he essentially severed his relationship with PRI.

                With the departure of Kirtley, the Board discussed what to do next. "There was general agreement", according to the minutes of the October 1976 meeting, "concerning the importance of employing a paleontologist, with a Ph.D.degree, as a new Assistant Director, to function both as a ‘management understudy' and as a fund-raiser". Yet another search committee was appointed, and at the April 9, 1977 Board meeting, Peter R. Hoover was reported as the committee's unanimous first choice. Hoover had received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and his PhD from Case Western Reserve University. His research speciality was Permian and Triassic brachiopods. Prior to coming to PRI he had been employed at the Smithsonian Institution. He arrived in Ithaca in May 1977.

                As Assistant Director, Hoover was charged with three main tasks: learning the ropes of PRI so that he could eventually take over the Directorship from Palmer; assisting with Bulletins of American Paleontology; and raising money. On May 3, 1978, Palmer wrote to Board President Harold Vokes formally requesting retirement as of June 30, 1979, and at the May 1978 Board meeting, Hoover was appointed Director, with a one-year contract.

                Hoover tried to establish a workable structure for fundraising in his first year, without much success. At its October 25, 1980 meeting, the Board voted not to renew Hoover's contract beyond the end of 1981, by which time they estimated that the Hodson money would have run out and they "felt that there is no obvious way in which our operating income is likely to increase significantly in the near future". The Board charged a new search committee with the task of finding "a retiree who would be willing to come to Ithaca and run PRI" for a minimal salary.

                At the May 9, 1981 Board meeting, however, the search committee reported no success  in identifying a retiree. But at the same meeting improved financial projections showed a small surplus and therefore no need to draw money from the Hodson Fund. In light of these circumstances, Hoover's contract was extended through June 30, 1982. The 1981-82 fiscal year also went relatively well, and the minutes of the May 31, 1982 Board meeting state that "... many of the Trustees expressed approval of and praise for Hoover's accomplishments as Director". Hoover was therefore offered a three-year contract.

                Katherine Palmer's health deteriorated considerably from 1980 onward, and she was hospitalized several times. She died on September 12, 1982.

                The decade-long transition in Directorship from Katherine Palmer to Peter Hoover highlighted two basic facts about PRI that had major implications for its subsequent history. First, the Institution never had a firm plan for how it would be supported financially. As long as the staff consisted largely of volunteers it worked, but faced with the prospect of having a real payroll, it was fiscally unprepared. The reason for this difficulty was the second basic fact: the scientific and cultural world had, in many respects, passed PRI by, and the fundamental reasons set out by Gilbert Harris for PRI's existence had become unworkable as a business model for a free-standing not-for-profit organization without huge endowment by the last quarter of the twentieth century. At least three important changes inside and outside of paleontology were responsible for this crucial shift.

                First was a change in academic paleontology. Harris was what paleontologists refer to as a "classical systematist" and biostratigrapher; that is, he worked primarily on describing new species of fossil organisms and documenting their occurrence in layers of sedimentary rock. The results of such work are the fundamental building blocks of all paleontology, and research collections - of the kind that Harris was so concerned with preserving - are essential to such systematic and biostratigraphic work. By the 1970s, however, a new generation of paleontologists wanted to use fossils mainly to study evolution, not just to date rocks. They wanted paleontology to be less of a servant of geology and more of an equal partner of evolutionary biology. Descriptive work was no longer cutting-edge.

                Second was an equally dramatic change in industrial paleontology. Until the 1980s, more than half of the professional paleontologists in the United States worked for oil companies, using fossils to characterize and date rock layers. The major oil companies supported or at least encouraged not just highly applied research that helped find petroleum, but also a significant amount of "pure" research by their staff geologists and paleontologists, and most of them paid to maintain their own extensive in-house specimen collections to foster this research. All of this changed with the great oil crash of the early 1980s, and the industry never again returned to its previous level of support for paleontology.

                Third was a shift in American society toward requiring science to demonstrate the social, commercial, or educational value of what it did, and a related expectation of science and natural history museums to provide a more "interactive" experience that entertained or (in some way that they could find "relevant") educated them, rather than just exhibiting objects.

                The market for PRI's major product, technical monographs in systematic paleontology - which was never large - was thus likely to shrink in the near future as both academic and industrial paleontology down-sized. And the Institution's other major core function - caring for and making available specimen collections - raised no direct revenue at all. With Katherine Palmer's advancing age, actual scientific research at PRI had also ground to a halt. Thus, unlike the situation at other free-standing research institutions, there were no active scientists who might obtain funding for their research from federal agencies like the National Science Foundation or by doing contract work for federal or commercial clients. Located in a small town in the middle of rural upstate New York, furthermore, there was no large pool of local corporations or individual donors as there might be in a major metropolitan area, and without any formal connection to Cornell University there was no access to alumni who might be potential donors. And - outside of invertebrate paleontology - PRI was virtually unknown to anyone. Its tiny public exhibit space was visited by at most a few hundred people a year and was hardly current (technologically or scientifically), and it had no other significant educational outreach to the general public.

 

The Peter Hoover Years (1981-1992)

 

                Until 1949, Harris had printed the Bulletins on his own presses located in the original PRI building. Katherine Palmer had at last contracted out to a local company, Norton (later renamed Arnold) Printing of Ithaca, where it remained until her retirement. In 1978, Peter Hoover moved printing to Allen Press in Lawrence, Kansas, which was and still is a major commercial printer of scientific journals. He also changed the size of the Bulletins from octavo (6x9") to quarto (8.5 x 11"), and gave the journal a more attractive new cover design, to replace its unfortunately trademark featureless gray. The Bulletins continues to be printed by Allen Press in this format today.

                Hoover introduced other important changes to PRI's publications. Up until 1978, most manuscripts submitted to the Bulletins had been reviewed only by Harris or Palmer. Hoover introduced the system of peer-review to the Bulletins for the first time, which was an important step in maintaining the scientific credibility of the journal. He also took steps to market PRI publications more actively. He improved the catalog of PRI publications and mailed it out more regularly to all PRI members, and he traveled to professional meetings to promote both the publications and PRI membership.

                PRI's financial stability was helped during the Hoover years by an alliance with another organization. In 1981, just when PRI was in such difficult financial straits, the Institution agreed to become the "business office" for the the Paleontological Society (PS), the largest professional society of paleontologists in America. PRI would maintain membership and subscription records and produce a newsletter in exchange for funding for one full-time clerical position as well as a part of the Director's salary and some "overhead". The relationship lasted for the next decade. It was never an easy arrangement, however, and by the early 1990s it had deteriorated considerably. In May 1992, the PS Council voted to terminate the business office relationship with PRI.

                Throughout the 1980s, the PS-PRI business relationship and increasing publication sales had slowly improved PRI's finances. In 1990, just as the PS relationship was foundering, former Harris student Norman Weisbord died, leaving a bequest to PRI of just over $200,000. With this addition, the PRI endowment reached an all-time high of more than $800,000.

                Collections and public outreach, however, were neglected during this time. The type collection was maintained, and received moderate use from other scientists, but the great bulk of the collection was almost completely inaccessible and unused. An internal document from early 1992 summarized the situation and the attitude that created it: "There is currently no locator for the collections. While such would be desirable, it would require a prohibitive amount of volunteer labor." Similarly, the Institution was virtually invisible to the local community. Katherine Palmer's "mini-museum" remained in place, virtually unchanged, and was still visited by a few hundred people a year, but there was no other formal educational outreach of any sort.

                At its November 1991 meeting, after much discussion, the PRI Board decided to change course and change Directors. Peter Hoover was told he would be leaving as Director on June 30, 1992, and a search was begun for a new Director. No minutes were taken at this meeting, and memories of Trustees who attended vary. One theme, however, recurs: PRI had to change. Serving a few dozen scientists a year did not, in the view of a growing number of Board members, justify the Institution's existence. PRI could either slowly wither away or, as Ray Van Houtte later repeatedly put it, "go for broke".

 

New Beginnings (1992- )

 

                When I arrived at PRI as its fourth Director on August 22, 1992, the Institution was in difficult physical condition. Virtually everything was dirty, and there was significant deferred maintenance. The non-type collections were stored in piles of cardboard boxes, many decaying, and there were piles of papers, books, and "stuff" almost everywhere. Fortunately I had help. A condition of my coming to PRI was that the Board allow for the hiring of a full-time assistant (bringing the total number of staff to four). Volunteers, which had been few in recent years, also began to reappear.

                The overall plan for our activity was laid out in my own mind even before I was offered the job. PRI, in my view, had to fulfill the potential which was to me so obvious. The Institution had three hugely valuable assets that no amount of money could purchase: it was the custodian of one of the largest invertebrate fossil collections in the nation; it published a highly-regarded technical journal; and it had a long and distinguished history. What it had not done was enter the late twentieth century by making these assets relevant to people and organizations with financial resources. So - with essentially a "blank check" from the endowment and extremely generous donations from the Board - we set out on a five-pronged rejuvenation agenda focused on cleaning, collections renovation, public educational outreach, marketing, and reestablishing connections with Cornell.

                The lower three floors of the main building were cleaned and painted; plaster was repaired, and broken lights, windows, and furniture were replaced; the former kitchen was converted to a functioning laboratory, and a modern darkroom was set up.

                In early 1993, through the efforts of Ray van Houtte and former Cornell Provost Keith Kennedy, we received a grant of $60,000 from Atlantic Philanthropic Service Company (later known as Atlantic Philanthropies), which allowed us to hire our first Director of Education, David Griffing, a new PhD from SUNY Binghamton, and thereby started the education program at PRI. Over the next decade Atlantic would provide more than $700,000 for educational outreach at PRI. Because we lacked adequate exhibit or program space, our first education programs focused on initiatives outside the Institution, from programming for underserved urban youth in Ithaca, Syracuse, and Utica, to on-line, video, and print resources for Earth science teachers. Most of these programs continue today, in addition to activities in the Museum of the Earth, and make PRI a major national provider of Earth science education resources.

                Also by early 1993, we had completed a rough inventory of the collections, and used this information in preparing a proposal to the National Science Foundation. In early 1994 we learned that NSF had funded our proposal, which provided our first compactorized storage cabinets, and allowed us to hire our first full-time collections staff. Over the next 10 years, NSF would provide more than $1 million in support for collections, and as a result, the PRI collections are today in better condition and more accessible than they have been in a half-century. Annual use of PRI's collections by scientists and students is more than four times what it was in 1992, and about the national average for a collection of its size in the U.S. The collections have also more than doubled in size during this time, as we absorbed collections from other institutions. Most significantly, PRI took responsibility for all of the modern mollusks and remaining non-botanical fossils from Cornell.

                All these specimens were initially stored in rented trailers in the back yard. In 1997, however, with funds provided by NSF, the McDonald Foundation, Park Foundation, and Trustee Peter Stifel, and thanks to the creative architecture of Trustee Anton Egner, we completed a two-story 6,000 square foot collections storage wing, the lower floor of which was devoted to collections storage - finally in the form of a proper open collections range - and the upper floor was used for temporary exhibit space.

 

The Museum of the Earth

 

                The concept of building a new physical structure that would serve as a public museum space first came to my attention through discussions among the staff in late 1993. I later learned that as early as 1990 or 1991, Ray Van Houtte was mentioning around town that PRI should and might be thinking of turning itself into a "museum".

                At the spring 1994 Board meeting, Ray made an impassioned speech to the Trustees, suggesting that there might be funds available from New York State for a museum in Ithaca. Without much discussion, the Board approved proceeding with initial conceptual planning for such an idea. By June, Ray had arranged for a meeting at PRI of an impressive group of state and local officials to hear about the concept and what it might do for tourism in the region. Meanwhile, it became clear that a formal "feasibility study" of the museum idea would be necessary to convince donors. At the fall 1994 Board meeting, the Trustees approved the study, and a year later heard the results: such a museum would indeed be a very welcome addition to Ithaca's educational and cultural landscape, but there was currently no basis of support that would provide the funds to build it.

                Ray was undeterred, and just a month later he and I had lunch with our State Senator, James Seward, and a representative of the Park Foundation, Ralph Jones. Seward and Jones agreed in principle that if each committed $1 million to the project, the other would too. When the State budget passed in July 1996, PRI suddenly had $2 million, and the unfeasible had become feasible.

                These funds allowed PRI to hire exhibits staff and a New York City museum consulting firm to guide us through the entire process. With their help, we hired the Washington, DC firm of Douglas/Gallagher was hired to lead planning and design of the exhibits, which they started in summer 1998. The New York architecture firm of Weiss/Manfredi was hired to design the building, and they began work in January 1999.

                Director of Education Rob Ross (who had replaced Dave Griffing in 1997) and I developed initial ideas and much of the detailed content of all of the exhibits, using the very broad concept of paleontology and Earth science that we both had shared since our days as fellow graduate students at Harvard in the 1980s. These plans were then painfully (for us) reduced, rewritten, and, ultimately, greatly improved by exhibit staff (which eventually totaled five full-time people) and the outside design team.

                Weiss/Manfredi's design included a beautiful atrium lobby -- just perfect, I thought, for a whale skeleton. In the summer of 1999 I began to send emails to see what the chances would be that we might acquire a whale skeleton. On October 21, 1999, I received a call informing me that there was a dead whale in New Jersey. If we could get there immediately, we could have it. So began the remarkable process that three years later put the 44-foot skeleton of North Atlantic Right Whale #2030 in the Museum of the Earth.

                Almost from the beginning we knew that we wanted the exhibits to focus on the geological and biological history of New York State, and this virtually required that we have a skeleton of a mastodon, because some of the very first known fossils of these Ice Age cousins of modern elephants had come from New York in the eighteenth century. We tried unsuccessfully to borrow one from another museum and were about to give up when, in September 1999 we were contacted by a family in Hyde Park, near Poughkeepsie, New York, who had found large bones in their backyard. What became known as the "Hyde Park mastodon" was excavated by PRI and Cornell in the early fall of 2000 and turned out to be one of the most complete and well-preserved mastodon skeletons ever found. Thus the Museum got its mastodon.

                The exhibit team changed and grew over the course of the project. Douglas/Gallagher dissolved and were replaced by Jeff Kennedy Associates in Boston. In addition to Kennedy, eventually there were separate firms or individuals hired to fabricate the exhibits, mount the 650 specimens in the exhibits, make the films, design the lights, and mount the large skeletons.          Following long delays caused by escalating costs and then the abrupt decline in the national economy in 2000 and 2001, construction began in September 2001. More fundraising delays caused completion to be put off still further. Finally, in June 2003, the building was done, and exhibit installation began. On September 27, 2003, Ray Van Houtte, then dying with cancer, cut the ribbon on the Museum of the Earth and it opened to the public two days later.

                The Museum project took almost exactly ten years and cost more than $11 million. PRI had raised $8 million toward this, and borrowed $3.5 million via a mortgage with the Tompkins Trust Company secured by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Park Foundation had contributed just over $2 million and the State of New York approximately $1.8 million. Members of PRI's Board of Trustees had personally contributed more than $600,000. Today, the Museum welcomes approximately 35,000 visitors a year. It is a significant regional tourist attraction as well as an major educational resource for central New York, and it is also a popular spot for community events. The building's design has received regional and national architectural acclaim. The Museum and its exhibits and programs have received national and international media attention.

 

PRI and Cornell

 

                Although there are surely advantages to being independent, PRI exists - and exists in Ithaca, New York - because of Cornell. It's separatists origins in the 1930s might be understandable, but by the 1990s its continued separation from the University made no sense. I accepted the Directorship of PRI with the understanding that I could, in principle, rebuild the PRI-Cornell relationship. As a first step, I was quickly was appointed an Adjunct Professor in Geological Sciences, a position without much glamour or authority, but nonetheless a high enough rung on the academic hierarchy to get a staff ID, and with it a certain acceptance into the University community, access to the library, and a symbolically useful "cornell.edu" email address.

                I used this very unexalted rank to do everything I could to remind Cornell of the potential value of PRI's resources. I had coincidentally arrived at a propitious moment to do so. Cornell geology in the 1990s was in the midst of a change of emphasis and name, from geophysics and tectonics to a new interdisciplinary approach known as "Earth system science", and from "Geological Sciences" to "Earth and Atmospheric Sciences" (EAS). This shift meant that paleontology - and PRI - were needed to integrate the effects of life on the history of Earth.

                Today, PRI's connections to Cornell are many, varied, and growing. By sharing with a wider public Cornell collections and expertise, PRI helps fulfill Cornell's landgrant mission to serve (as Cornell President David Skorton put it in his inaugural address) "the world outside our gates". The Museum of the Earth is a regular resource for Cornell undergraduate courses in biology, geology, anthropology, and art, and PRI collections and staff are a resource for Cornell undergraduates engaged in independent research. PRI staff regularly teach undergraduate classes in EAS and advise PhD students in geology and zoology. PRI's staff of 20 includes 4 PhDs who carry on original research in the disciplines of evolutionary biology, paleontology, global climate change, paleoceanography, and sedimentary geology, enhancing those academic areas at Cornell.

                On November 20, 2004, PRI and Cornell signed an agreement of formal affiliation. Under this agreement, PRI remains a free-standing organization, but connections to the University are officially acknowledged and can be built upon.

                No one can know what would have happened had Gilbert Harris not left Cornell in a huff in 1932, but I like to believe that he would be pleased and proud that the both the University of which he was so long a part and the little institution to which he dedicated the last quarter of his life are now reconnecting in a way that will benefit both organizations, as well as society at large.

 

*The above text is abridged from:

The First 75 Years: A History of the Paleontological Research Institution

Further Reading

 

Allmon, W.D., 2004, Opening a new natural history museum in twenty-first century America: A

                case study in historic perspective. In Natural history institutions: Past, present, and

                future. Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, vol. 55, Supplement 1, no.

                11, A. Leviton, ed., pp. 245-266.

Allmon, W.D., 2004, A leviathan of our own. The tragic and amazing story of North Atlantic

                right whale #2030. Special Publication No. 25, Paleontological Research Institution,

                Ithaca, NY, 69 p.

Allmon, W.D., 2007, The First 75 Years: A History of the Paleontological Research Institution. Special Publication

                No. 29, Paleontological Research Institution, Ithaca, New York, 135 pp.

Allmon, W.D., and R.M. Ross, 2004, Earth system science and the new Museum of the Earth.

                American Paleontologist, 12(1): 9-12.

Brice, W. R., 1989, Cornell geology through the years. Cornell Engineering Histories, vol. 2,

                Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 230 pp.

Brice, W. R., 1996, Gilbert Dennison Harris: a life with fossils. Bulletins of American

                Paleontology, no. 350, 154 pp.

Palmer, K.V.W., 1982, The Paleontological Research Institution -- Fifty Years: 1932-1982.

                Paleontological Research Institution Special Publication No. 18, 29 pp.