The collaboration with Florida extends well beyond the state university. Bruce MacFadden, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said some of the fossils collected at the expansion site will be put on display at the museum in August in honor of the Panama Canal centennial celebration.
The most impressive fossils recovered by Jaramillo’s team will remain in Panama. The Frank Gehry-designed Museum of Biodiversity, slated to open in May in Panama City, will house a 6-million-year-old marlin skeleton embedded in a rock found at the expansion site, which MacFadden calls “spectacular.” Original shells and replicas of bone fragments from the canal will also be on display at the museum, an asymmetrical, brightly colored structure which stands out at the mouth of the canal and against the city’s growing skyline.
A fine-grained limestone that is 15 million to 16 million years old and slightly bigger than a soccer ball greets visitors near the entrance to the museum. Further along, a room covered almost entirely in projection screens—including under the glass floor and on the high ceiling—runs a larger-than-life montage of frogs, whales, turtles and wild flowers found in Panama while a soundtrack of thunderstorms and waterfalls envelops visitors.