Zygorhiza

No, it's not a dinosaur! Our "Ziggy" is short for whale. What his bones tell us is that if people had been living in Middle Georgia 40,000,000 years ago, they would have had a house on the beach!

No one knows why our Ziggy died. Perhaps he got stuck on a muddy sandbar without enough water in which to swim. Then his bones were turned into fossils by minerals in the soil as he was buried, and found millions of years later in a kaolin mine in Twiggs County, Georgia.

The vertebrae of a small shark were still inside Ziggy's rib cage, a sign that the whale had eaten his dinner shortly before he died! When Ziggy was brought to the Museum and reassembled, he was the first animal of his species, or kind, to be put on display anywhere in the world.

Now he helps visitors learn about the history of the earth and the animals who have lived on it.

 

Gesturing Woman

Viloa Frey, 1933- American

Low-fire whiteware body, commercial glazes. Museum purchase with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts matched by the E.J. Grassman Trust and Georgia Pine Level Foundation. “Frey is a cartoonist who thinks big. Her giant ceramic figures seem like gods of the average, illustrating gesture, figure and expression as a realm of the lesser gods…” Art Form 23:101 11/84. Ms. Frey has said, “If anything, I’m interested in a cultural middle (which is not to say the average): I’m not interested in either extreme. I try to bring together multicultural influences and influences that transgress time.”