Looking for something new in the new year and finding that your inner archaeologist is calling? If so, head to the New Jersey State Museum and the recently opened Innovation Lab and Learning Center.
Check through the fishbowl-like room with large windows and spot Wayne Callahan, a volunteer doing the painstaking work of piecing together a jaw bone from a 66-million-year-old crocodile. “New Jersey is a very interesting state for paleontology,” he says with understatement.
The New Jersey State Museum (NJSM) constantly recruits and trains volunteers to do everything from leading tours to putting fossils together.
David Parris — the long-time curator of natural history at the NJSM — is the dean of the volunteer corps here. Parris has worked at the state museum since 1971 and oversees the volunteers in the science area and the Innovation Lab — or a paleontology preparation laboratory to treat and prepare recent fossil finds for study and preservation.
The lab is part of the recent renovations to the museum building that opened in the 1960s. “We had it less set up formally in the old natural history hall. We thought why not set up something so people can see what is going on? It’s become one of the most popular features in the natural history hall. It’s become a very fortuitous facility, and we’re making it bigger and better,” Parris says as he moves between the downstairs office to the upstairs lab.
There is a diverse group of volunteers under his watch at the museum. “Some are local people who have an interest,” Parris says of the volunteers. “Some are college students looking to get some experience. Some are retirees interested in their field of work. In the 40-plus years I’ve been here we’ve had a gradual decrease in the number of volunteers. Unfortunately, (the museum’s) staff has decreased. We need to invest a lot of time to train them,” he says.
To give one unusual area of volunteering, Parris mentions “Vertebrate Paleontology and Stratigraphy of the Late Cretaceous Holmdel Park Site, Monmouth County, New Jersey,” a paper recently presented a conclave of fossil collectors in South Dakota.
The already mentioned Callahan (a former engineer with geology training) was listed as an author of that paper, along with Parris, and Parris’s museum associates Robert K. Denton (who worked as a professional geologist) and Robert O’Neill (a Hamilton Township truck driver). “The two Bobs discovered that site and are multiply-published authors on the subject. They’re technically volunteers because we’ve never paid them,” says Parris.
Then there is one of the museum’s newest volunteers, Brittney Oleniacz. She is a Phillipsburg, New Jersey, native who recently received her bachelor’s degree in geology and environmental biology from Edinboro University, in remote northwestern Pennsylvania near Lake Erie.
Oleniacz is peering through a stereoscope into a box, separating threadlike bones of a corn snake from dirt granules. “She’s gaining experience, as you can see,” Parris says. “She’s benefiting the collection.” He adds that osteology or a collection of bones to study is the museum’s most well-used collection.
Regarding training, Parris says, “It depends on exactly what they’re going to do. With fossil preparation we try to give them a fairly easy task. We will give them gradually more difficult tasks. With docents, most people come to us with fairly high qualifications. If they come with high qualifications we give a lot of thought to what projects to assign them to. It just depends on their interests and the tasks we have available. We try to accommodate as many as we can, especially if they’re high school and college students who are looking for an internship. We’re not looking for any one type of person, but we have a considerable number of jobs that they can do.”
Parris, 70, was the son of a Wichita State University professor of anthropology and archaeology father and a Wichita Public Schools mother and attended the University of Kansas before receiving a graduate degree from Princeton University.
Parris and his wife, Susan, a computer programmer for the New Jersey Department of Human Services, met when Parris came to Princeton. They have lived in West Windsor since 1973 and have two sons in the Princeton area: Tim, an artist who also works at Jacobus Pharmaceutical, and Dan, who works at Braun Research.
With the demand for NJSM volunteers continuing, those interested can check in first at the museum’s website, then click on “volunteers and interns” to get more information. There are four collecting bureaus and the bureau of education: archaeology and ethnology, cultural history, fine art, and natural history (which includes the planetarium).
In most cases, Parris says, applicants for the volunteer program submit their information, then curators of specific bureaus are notified and, depending on the qualifications and interests, “we see what we are able to do.”
New Jersey State Museum, 205 West State Street, Trenton, Tuesday through Sundays, 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Suggested admission $5. 609-292-6464 or www.nj.gov/state/museum.
— Ron Shapella and Dan Aubrey
