Eighty years after a disgruntled Cornell geology professor, Gilbert D. Harris, picked up his fossils and went home—to establish the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) in an emphatically off-campus backyard—the science of ancient life at Cornell is set to expand significantly, with the signing of an affiliation agreement between PRI and Cornell.

For its part, Cornell gets another link in its network of “distributed

PRI's mastodon tooth

museums,” with the addition of the Museum of the Earth, which PRI built and opened about six miles northwest of campus in 2003.

“And PRI gets, among other things, the opportunity to reach more of the community and the wider world,” said the institution’s fourth director, Warren D. Allmon, of some highly successful educational-outreach programs PRI offers to persuade students of all ages that earth science is not as dull as dirt.

Cornell’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), the modern version of Harris’s home department, is looking forward to increased connections to PRI’s expertise in earth history education at pre-college and post-college levels, as well as its research opportunities, according to EAS chair Teresa E. Jordan. “Just as a central theme in PRI’s Museum of the Earth is to illustrate that the biological, physical, and chemical systems interact,” she said, “this is an important thrust of Cornell research, which can benefit from PRI’s extensive collections of ancient and modern life forms.”

The prolonged estrangement began with a dispute over fire safety. Harris, a Cornell professor from 1894 to 1934, was nearing retirement and intended to leave his extensive invertebrate fossil collection and library to the university—on one condition: that the university provide a suitable, fire-proof building with nonflammable furnishings.

When Cornell demurred, Harris built his own facility of concrete, with metal fixtures, next to his home in the Cornell Heights section of Ithaca. He filled it with many thousands of fossils, laboratories, books, and the offices of PRI, which was chartered as an independent educational institution by the state of New York in 1933. In 1968 PRI moved across the lake to a 12,000-square-foot stone structure on Trumansburg Road that was once an orphanage for the Odd Fellows fraternal organization.

The early rift notwithstanding, research accomplishments by Cornell faculty members are featured among the museum’s exhibits. In addition, Cornellians are volunteers and work-study students at the museum, and PRI’s board of trustees includes four Cornell faculty members, two staff members, and several prominent alumni.

And now the relationship will be official—or at least semiofficial.

“The affiliation agreement is defined more by what it is not than what it is,” Allmon observed. It is not a financial arrangement of any sort, he says, and the words ‘Cornell University’ will not be attached to the institution’s already-unwieldy, 13-syllable moniker. “It’s really just a beginning, an opportunity to expand the connections that we already have with the university.”

—Roger Segelken
Cornell News Service