Hilo exhibit HILO >> A few hundred years ago, a large, flightless goose stumbled through a hole in the ground into an old lava tube in North Kona.
includes statue
of extinct goose
The Lyman Museum will
open "Hawaii Before Humans"By Rod Thompson
rthompson@starbulletin.comUnable to fly out, it died, leaving its bones to tell the tale.
Visitors to Hilo's Lyman Museum can see those bones, and a fleshed-out reconstruction of the extinct goose, at a 9 a.m.-3 p.m. open house today at the museum.
The free event marks the opening of the museum's new permanent exhibit, "Hawaii Before Humans."
The Lyman House missionary home and the museum's second-floor exhibits on Hawaiian culture remain unchanged, but visitors will find a $1 million redesign of the first floor.
Visitors enter "Hawaii Before Humans" through a simulated lava tube, then move through exhibits showing life evolving on the Big Island until they come to the 21/2-foot-tall goose, said museum director Dolly Strazar.
State wildlife officer Jon Giffin discovered the bones of that specimen in about 1993, he said.
Radiocarbon dating on four others, at $600 each, reveals they lived 500 to 900 years ago, Giffin said. The goose survived the arrival of Polynesians but probably became extinct as the Hawaiian population peaked in the 1600s, he said.
DNA studies show the goose, like the smaller nene, was related to the Canada goose, Giffin said.
Faced with the bones of numerous extinct birds from Hawaii, the Smithsonian Institution has yet to give the goose a scientific name, Giffin said.
Museum assistant curator Jill Maruyama said the museum is holding an informal contest to give it an unofficial name.
A sense of humor can be seen in the names given to models of fish in the deep-sea exhibit, such as Babe the ulua and Tony the tiger shark.
Museum personnel used inventiveness elsewhere. The "snow" in the alpine exhibit is Styrofoam cups, run through a blender and then chopped finer in a coffee grinder, Strazar said.
Visitors will also find most of museum founder Orlando Lyman's world-class mineral and seashell collections still on display, including the prominently highlighted orlymanite, named for Lyman.