Meet Duke鈥檚 Fossil Finders

Monthly open houses at the Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History offer glimpses of work behind evolutionary discoveries

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A worker cleaning a fossil.

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The Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History at 1013 Broad St. hosts free open houses on the last Saturday of each month.

But with early primates potentially arriving in South America around the same time, if a primate fossil is found, it would fill important gaps in our understanding of evolutionary history.

鈥淛ust one little tooth could tell an incredible story,鈥 said Matt Borths, Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History Curator and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology. 鈥淏ut finding that tooth is like looking for a needle in a haystack.鈥

The spirit of discovery defines the work that unfolds in the one-story brick building on Broad Street, the Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History鈥檚 home since it moved from the Duke Lemur Center鈥檚 main facility in 2000,

On the , the museum hosts open house events, welcoming community members of all ages to explore its work. At the next open house, which will be from 1-4 p.m. on Saturday, February 22, visitors can handle fossils and watch as museum staff reveal the remains of animals that lived tens of millions of years ago.

Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History Curator and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology Matt Borths has overseen the museum since 2018. Photo by Stephen Schramm.

鈥淚n a lot of museums, you only get to see the exhibits,鈥 said Fossil Preparator Karie Whitman, who has worked at Duke since 2020. 鈥淚t鈥檚 cool that we get to show people how we work with these fossils, how we get them out of the rock and how we find them.鈥

The museum features a small exhibition space with fossilized primate skeletons and ancient bone fragments that help tell the story of how lemurs 鈥 and other primate relatives 鈥 evolved. But beyond the display cases, the museum鈥檚 four staff members work alongside students and volunteers to care for and share the wonders in an expansive collection of fossils.

The museum鈥檚 collection, which features more than 35,000 fossils, was initiated in the late 1970s by Elwyn Simons, a pioneering paleontologist and former Duke Lemur Center Director who passed away in 2016. The collection includes a wide range of specimens, from primates to snakes, turtles and sharks.

Available for study by researchers at Duke and elsewhere, the collection is housed in crowded rooms and neatly organized cases standing in nearly every corner of the building.

Catherine Riddle, Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History Collections Manager, holds the skull of an ancient squirrel, one of more than 35,000 pieces in the museum's collection. Photo by Stephen Schramm.

Virtual 3-D models of several specimens from the collection are available online for study by experts worldwide. The high-definition renderings were made using the sophisticated CT scanners at Duke鈥檚 .

And more of the museum鈥檚 fossils have yet to be discovered, still trapped in blocks of sandstone brought back by museum team members from annual summer trips to Wyoming.

In the fossil preparation lab at the rear of the museum, Whitman uses small pneumatic tools that resemble miniature jackhammers to deftly carve away stone and uncover fossils such as the of a now-extinct mammal called a Metacheiromys.

The skeleton鈥檚 sturdy arms and claws show that the Metacheiromys, which is an ancestor of the pangolin, a small mammal found mostly in Africa and Asia, likely dug through soil for its food while the ancestors of monkeys and lemurs hopped through the trees above.

鈥淭hese are our relatives,鈥 Borths said of the fossils in the museum鈥檚 collection. 鈥淭hese are the ancestors of lemurs, so we want to bring people in to meet them because this belongs to all of us.鈥

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