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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.
The museum is set to open this summer, Lavrov said. To volunteer to
move the bones, call the museum at
(201) 291-8848. Volunteers must be over 18. Ya gotta love 'em, them
there bones
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