Posted at: 03/01/2010 6:52 PM
By: David Springer

Print Story  Email to a Friend

Exhibit: Ice Age 2010

(ABC 6 NEWS) -- The Quarry Hill Nature Center in Rochester got a little more crowded Monday. The center's newest exhibit, which contains the skeleton of a wooly mammoth, has just arrived. But that is just half the battle of getting it ready for the thousands of visitors expected to come see it.

"We've been in the planning phase for this exhibit for about two years. Two years is what it takes to pull off something this big," says Pam Meyer, Assistant Director of the Quarry Hill Nature Center.

The center's newest exhibit is called “Ice Age 2010”.  It includes a Sabretooth Tiger, mummified baby mammoth, a pigmy mammoth and the Hebior Mammoth, one of the most complete Mammoth skeletons ever found.

Getting it out of the crates is one thing. Putting it together can be something altogether different...

"It is like a very big giant 3-D jigsaw puzzle. A lot of kind of maneuvering, pushing, shoving, trying not to break some of the smaller little pieces. Especially like the toes and things like that," says Quarry Hill Naturalist Carrie Nelson.

But all the effort is worth it for the Nature Center.

"The ice age shaped our area and we find these around here. This is what walked around thousands of years ago," says Meyer.

And the center expects nearly 20-thousand people to walk through its door just to come and see the exhibit in the four weeks it'll be on display.

"To see it all come together and to see the majesty and the size of that these animals were... its pretty special,” they say.

“Ice Age 2010” opens on March 6th and goes until April 4th.