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The Bergen Museum
of Art &Science
Paramus, NJ 07652

Be a Volunteer for the Bergen Museum

It's not for the money. It's not for the fame.
It's not for any personal gain. It's just for love of fellowman.
It's just to lend a helping hand.
It's just to give a tithe of self.
That's something you can't buy with wealth.
It's not medals won with pride. It's for that feeling deep inside.
It's that reward down in you heart.
It's that feeling that you've been a part,
Of helping others near and far. That makes you a volunteer!

Mr. Yost (above right) attended the volunteers meeting July 10 and lectured on the differences between the Wooly Monmouth and the Mastodon. Both types of bones are in the Museum's collection.

JOIN OUR VOLUNTEERS ■ CONTACT jjwaldron007@verizon.net

Click here to download our Volunteer Application which you can Fax to (201) 291-8808

Reprinted from the Bergen Record

PARAMUS - Looking for a good workout? Instead of hefting weights, how about lifting some mastodon bones?

The Bergen Museum is looking for a few good fossil wranglers to help move the bones from a temporary home in Orange County to the museum's new quarters at the Bergen Mall. All prospective mastodon movers need are muscles - and their own gloves.

Mastodons, which looked like prehistoric furry elephants on steroids, roamed North Jersey and lower New York State more than 10,000 years ago. The bones were found in 1962 at a Route 80 construction site in Hackensack. Museum Administrator Mimi Lavrov said the museum also owns a large fossil called the Dwarskill mastodon, which was unearthed by water company workers on the banks of the Oradell Reservoir in Norwood in 1974.

But when the museum went into temporary quarters four years ago, the mastodons needed another home. The Dwarskill fossil has been in storage at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, where it will stay for the time being, Lavrov said. The other bones went to Museum Village in Monroe, N.Y., where they were placed on exhibit with other fossils.

And those mastodon bones are what the Bergen Museum is bringing home to Paramus to set up in a new permanent exhibit. They just need a little help in getting here.

Museum officials are hoping strong men - and women - will volunteer for a little bone-hauling on July 14. The plaster-preserved bones, which are on pallets, have to be lifted into a truck at Museum Village, and then lifted out of the truck and into the Bergen Museum at the mall.

"It's exciting for us to have them back and to get [the museum] off the ground again," Lavrov said.

It has been a long road for the Bergen Museum. Founded in 1956, the museum was displaced in January 1999 from its county-owned headquarters on Ridgewood Avenue because the county needed the space for offices. The museum set up for awhile in temporary space in a Hackensack office building, but in March 2002 the exhibits went into a warehouse. In August 2002, museum representatives signed a lease for a 3,000-square-foot space in the lower level of the Bergen Mall.