On a February morning in Lafayette, middle schoolers from Math, Science and Arts Academy West in Plaquemine wandered past fossils of mastodons and saber-toothed tigers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Science Museum. A group of seventh-grade girls chatted beside the massive remains of animals that once walked through the Acadiana marshes.
The exhibit, “Prehistoric Louisiana: A Journey through Ice Age Acadiana,” was designed by UL paleontology students and features mastodon bones, jaguar fossils, a saber-toothed tiger and an American lion skull.
Jennifer Hargrave, the current director of the museum and a paleontology professor at UL, proudly shows off her students’ work, which explains facts about the discoveries.
“I’ve involved the different student groups so they get their volunteer hours, get to do outreach, talk to the community, share their research and their passions,” Hargrave said. “That’s been a great thing to do, because everybody thinks differently.”
As a child, Hargrave wanted to be a paleontologist. She has since been on digs on all seven continents. Although she lived in Natchitoches and graduated from UL, she said she didn’t expect to end up digging in the mud in south Louisiana, but she’s glad to help provide opportunities to her students — experiences that she didn’t have when she was in college.
Kevin Krantz, the current facilities manager at the museum and former director, says the museum gets visits from surrounding area schools frequently — one day MSA West and the next Sacred Heart.
Krantz has worked with the museum in some capacity for 18 years, and he has seen it grow from an empty space that hosted traveling exhibits to this full-scale, 10,000-square-foot science museum.
From city to university leadership
In 2020, Krantz’s staff was laid off when the Lafayette Consolidated Government under former mayor Josh Guillory closed the museum during the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to the large cost of running the museum, the city was considering not reopening it.
“We had to begin again and kind of start over,” Krantz said, “and that’s where the partnership with the university came in. We already had a cooperative endeavor agreement with the School of Sciences, in particular the Geoscience department.”
That relationship allowed UL’s geosciences department to assume operational control of the museum.
In 2021, the agreement between the two entities started, and by 2022, the transition was complete. The Lafayette Consolidated Government owns the building while the university runs the museum. Both parties agreed to a five-year contract.
Hargrave became involved in the museum in 2016 through the School of Geosciences at UL. The partnership with the city that started in 2013 resulted in an exhibit space, a paleontology lab and a repository space (where fossils are kept).
“The School of Geoscience was changing the exhibits every two to three years, bringing in different dinosaurs or different giant mammals from the Cenozoic. That really drew a lot of attention to the museum,” Hargrave said. “Everybody likes to go see dinosaurs.”
Hargrave moved into a leadership role when the university/city museum partnership began on a larger scale.
A place of student learning and contemporary discovery
“The Prehistoric Louisiana: A Journey through Ice Age Acadiana” exhibit focuses on Louisiana fossils, and the discovery and lab work is ongoing.
Volunteers and UL students are there daily in the laboratory, studying fossils, cleaning bones and preparing specimens for display.
Mary Landry, a retired volunteer who has helped at the museum since 2017, is known as the “Tooth Fairy” in the lab because of her meticulous cleaning of ancient animal teeth. Landry picks and cleans a tooth until it shines. On this particular Wednesday, she was working hard on a jaguar tooth that was found in a Church Point bayou.
“All of this is just for fun,” Landry said as she gently brushes the tooth, “but the opportunity to be able to do it is the whole thing.”
Hargrave says that the prehistoric Louisiana exhibit is her favorite in the museum because it features fossils found in Church Point, Jefferson Island and Avery Island. Although Louisiana doesn’t have dinosaur fossils, the state was home to giant mastodons, jaguars, American lions, saber-toothed tigers and other massive creatures that once prowled the marshes.
While many paleontologists perform their digs in dry, arid places, Hargrave and her students find fossils buried in the mud. When bodies of water shift or are drained, fossils long buried in mud are revealed.
At UL, Hargrave teaches a “Museum Techniques” course, and the final project results in students creating an exhibit.
“I am a scientist, and I’m going to present the facts, which doesn’t always make for a good exhibit,” Hargrave said. “But having students in there, they think differently than I do. It’s a really great collaboration.”
Moving forward
The contract between the university and city government is in its last year. What happens next has yet to be decided.
Krantz says being under the umbrella of the university provides more advertising exposure for the museum through billboards, word of mouth, promotional materials and involvement from schools.
“There are resources that we have available to us that really benefit us in the way of exhibits,” he said. “We benefit by virtue of the teamwork from within the university, not just being under the university umbrella.”
As the contract’s future is decided, Hargrave says the mission remains the same: putting science in front of the next generation.
On that February morning, the seventh graders from Plaquemine lingered beside the mastodon bones, pointing and whispering about creatures that once roamed Louisiana.
“Since this is a math, science and arts academy, I thought it would be great to bring them to the science museum,” said Megan Edwards, the Jr. Beta Club sponsor at MSA West.
The students were visiting Lafayette for the statewide Jr. Beta Convention.
After working with middle schoolers, Edwards has enough experience to know better than to set her expectations too high.
“I didn’t expect that they would like it,” she said, “but they really did. They talked about how much they enjoyed it after the trip. A few of the eighth graders even want to return with their science teacher.”
For many of them, it was the closest they’d ever come to Ice Age history — and perhaps the first time they imagined uncovering something themselves.