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Most impressive, perhaps, of the many interesting rooms in the Morrill
museum—two lower floors of Morrill hall—is Elephant hall. In this quiet
room time yawns, and down her great throat one sees the endless vista of
the years. Here animals of all eras, usually clad only in their bones,
confront one. If you are sensitive to the ghostly whispers of the past
you might well bring a companion. To span millions of years alone in an
afternoon is too much; the winds between as the centuries whirl are too
vigorous.
Last Saturday we gazed, alone we believed, at a beautiful pair of albino
coyotes (Wheeler county, Nebraska, 1940) with touching blue eyes; at a
Peruvian mummy (pre-Inca)—a baby with its little skull resting on moth
eaten arms; at the skeleton of a dawn horse, no higher than your knee,
dug up in Sioux county, and were kneeling intent before a reconstructed
dodo when we turned suddenly and encountered the saturnine eye of the
ever present guard.
Rightly, the museum takes no chances. Elephant hall contains one of the
best collections of modern and fossil elephants in the world, and in
addition real or reconstructed animals of many ages. Backgrounds for
these reassembled bones of animals which sniffed the earth when it was
new were painted in delicate tints by Elizabeth Dolan. The late Gutzon
Borglum, stepping into Elephant hall in a woolly camelskin coat, stopped
in his tracks among the ancient bones and murmured paradoxically and
appreciatively, “A new world.”
One of the activities of the museum has been research on the antiquity
of man in North America. Many discoveries have been made in Nebraska,
and one of the few existing collections of Yuma-Folsom artifacts is to
be found here.