For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This September 1977 Classic offers a first-person tour through Baylor’s Strecker Museum, from a towering Kodiak bear and a 75-million-year-old plesiosaur skeleton to a whale jawbone big enough to stick your head into. Museum director Dr. Bryce Brown reveals the behind-the-scenes storage rooms packed with fossils, bird eggs, and specimens dating back to the 1800s. It’s a nostalgic, hands-on look at one of Baylor’s most underappreciated campus treasures.
Six sets of eyes stare timelessly from a totem pole on the stairs that lead to the basement of Sid Richardson Science Building. A distinct, though not unpleasant smell is in the air — a smell common to most museums. It grows stronger as I reach the bottom of the stairs.
I open the cool, plate-glass door with “Strecker Museum” written on it in bold, gold letters.
Once through it, the first thing I see in the museum is the bear. He is a huge, white, Kodiak bear standing upright with claws flailing at the air and sharp teeth bared. He is far more fierce looking than the sign beside him, which says, “The bear: Patron Saint of Baylor,” would indicate.
On the wall another sign says “The John K. Strecker Museum, established in 1893. Space, rocks, plants, minerals, fossils, animals, mankind.”
I pass by the displays of rocks and minerals and Australian and Polynesian culture. On rounding the corner my attention is attracted by a huge cross section of a tree with tiny lights scattered across the wood. That stops me.
There are about thirty of these lights, each with a reference below. The object is to find a reference point, then press the button; and the bulb lights the correct point on the tree. For example, history, “1861 — Secession of Texas from the Union,” or science, “Dry years cause little growth and hence narrow annual rings.”
I happily spend twenty minutes playing with the buttons until two pushy youngsters tell me to share. Insulted, I move on.
A few steps farther on I see a large skeleton lying at rest on a large rock slab. I read the sign and learn that this is the skeleton of an extinct Polycotylid Plesiousaur who lived in the upper Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic Era. For those who are dusty on (or never knew) their Geology 101 facts, the sign explains that this was about 75 million years ago.
That 75 million years impresses me! That was long before Old Main, Baylor or even the Baptists were around. Anything that managed to keep its remains around that long deserves this place of honor in the museum as far as I am concerned.
I continue on past display after display of different plants, rocks and animals common to the Central Texas region.
My favorites are the ones that make learning a challenge. For instance, in the bird display case there are ten dangling claws, and the birds to whom they belong are hanging separately.
To the side of the claws is a sign reading, “Guess what bird they are from! Do you know these bird feet?” “Of course I do,” I answer, and I spend the next few minutes matching owl feet to owls and woodpecker feet to woodpeckers.
Another display case contains various bones. Two human pelvic bones and skulls (“Can you guess which is male and which is female?” hang with signs explaining the difference between the male and female bones, and why they are different. It is interesting, but not as much fun as the birds.
Moving on I come to a huge skeleton of a prehistoric whale. The gigantic jawbone makes up the greatest part of the skeleton. The sign says that this whale was 50 feet long and weighed over 29 tons.
I look around to be sure no one is watching, then I stick my head into the huge mouth. If you want to develop empathy for poor Jonah go stick your head into the mouth of the whale in Strecker Museum.
The back corner of the museum is like a page out of Kipling’s Jungle Book. A delicate looking gazelle and a gnu, which looks something like a skinny water buffalo, peep timidly from behind the brush. Standing at their feet is a dik dik, which looks like a tiny replica of a deer. A kudu with majestic curling horns stands by a grotesquely ugly warthog with small, beady eyes and short horns coming from his nose. An eland, which proves to be no less exotic in appearance than in name, has two twisted horns coming from the top of its head.
These animals and others were donated to the museum from the D. L. Jaworski (Leon’s brother) world collection of animals. Although the animals are stuffed, they are arranged very realistically — and they are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a zoo.
The next thing I come to is the “living Museum.” I’ve heard this is where they keep their live animals.
There are specimens quite alive in glass cages all around me. Several snakes have just shed their skins.
A few feet away I come to the newest permanent addition to the museum exhibits. It is a display on the history of man in Central Texas. The first display depicts man’s appearance in the area. I’m startled to find that 12,000 years ago half-naked savages were running around the Baylor campus. I also discover that in 1772 the Waco Indians settled on the banks of the Brazos, probably where the Waco Convention Center now stands.
I move on to the nineteenth century to the Civil War display. It is a small display — just some papers, a Union army coat and a bullet-riddled log taken from a battle site. What really moves me in the display is a drum that belonged to some unknown boy in the Union army. It is just like the drums I’ve seen pictured in history books — yet here it is, so real and, somehow, so pathetic.
The last display in the museum is a real log cabin, taken from its original site about thirty miles south of Waco and moved to the museum. It is decorated in a realistic way, graphically illustrating the simple life people in this area lived a hundred years ago.
My second visit to Strecker Museum two weeks later is to talk to the museum director, Dr. Bryce Brown.
I follow Brown on a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum. In large, dimly lit rooms (light makes things deteriorate faster) he pulls out drawers of specimens, some dating back to the late 1800s.
In fact, according to Brown, the museum is about sixty per cent storage space and forty per cent display area. For every fossil, bird egg or moose head on display, there are many others of not quite as fine a quality in storage.
One room contains shelves reaching to the ceiling, stuffed with jars full of frogs, lizards and snakes. Brown explained that students use these specimens for study purposes. Brown pulls out a drawer full of bird eggs and explains, “Scientists have come from all over to study these eggs. They were collected before DDT was used, so they use them to study its effects.”
Space and money are the two things the museum needs most, Brown says. Until a few years ago the museum was located in a wing of Pat Neff Hall. The move to Sid Richardson was a definite improvement, Brown said, but the museum is still bursting at its seams.
“Right now we have a large, complete fossil of a sea turtle and no place to put it,” Brown said. “According to a University of Texas paleontologist, it’s the biggest one ever found,” he added. “Its skull is two feet long, and it measures eleven feet in width across its back. It will be stored until a time that it can be displayed.”
The prehistoric turtle fossil was found, like so many other fossils in the museum, right around Waco. “Many people probably don’t realize that Texas is one of the best fossil areas in the world,” Brown said. The museum staff and volunteers often find and bring in displays with loving care.
The plesiousaur skeleton was found just below the old Lake Waco Dam on the Bosque River in 1948 by two boys, James and Wayne Brown (no relation to Dr. Brown). Headlines from the Baylor Lariat on June 8, 1948, read “Prehistoric animal found at Lake Waco — Baylor geologist working to extricate fossil skeleton.”
“This animal lived about 75 million years ago, when Baylor was an open sea,” Brown said. “We had to work very quickly to remove the skeleton because the city had to shut off the water for us,” he said. “If water from the dam had churned the skeleton, it could have broken it up and destroyed it.” In the final stages of removing the skeleton intact in its rock bed, Brown said, the Baylor football team’s muscle power was called on. Brown recalled that a watchman had to be posted at night before the skeleton was removed. Eager Waco residents seemed to want to take home part of the skeleton as a souvenir.
The huge whale fossil was donated to Baylor in 1905 by a missionary from Brazil, Brown said. John Strecker was the museum director at that time and had the huge fossil brought in on railroad cars.
Brown is very interested in getting Baylor students to utilize the museum. “We are trying to be educational,” he said. “That is a museum’s primary purpose.” Brown said that it is not just the science classes that utilize the museum. “Art students come over here to sketch,” he said. “We’ve even had the schools of law and education find ways to use the museum.” Brown said that Baylor students don’t take full advantage of the museum, adding that for many it may be because they are unaware of the museum.
