- On this special edition of "ARTEFFECTS," a multifaceted exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art dives into the history of the ichthyosaur.

- I'm dealing with something that is really bigger than us as people, both on the physical scale and also on the time scale.

I think that is the most important message of "Deep Time."

- That story is coming right up on this special edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for "ARTEFFECTS" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, with Bill Pearce Motors.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

(upbeat music) In memory of Sue McDowell, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

- Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan, and welcome to the special edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

This award earning program is celebrating its 10th season on the air.

To mark the occasion, we have produced a special extended "ARTEFFECTS" segment of prehistoric proportions.

Long before there were humans or even dinosaurs, there were ichthyosaurs, colossal marine reptiles that swam and thrived in an ancient ocean.

That's the focus of "Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada," a new dynamic exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art.

"ARTEFFECTS" producer Rebecca Cronon shows us how the exhibit came to life and how it celebrates the ichthyosaur.

(gentle music) - What is an ichthyosaur?

The name means simply the fish lizard.

- I wanted to create an atmosphere that helps you to suspend disbelief.

- "Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada" looks at these fossils from both a scientific and an art perspective.

- There are so many stories in the exhibition and I think that they all offer really unique and exciting entry points into this field of study.

- "Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada" is an exploration on scale.

(gentle music) (dramatic music) - The Nevada Museum of Art is the only accredited art museum in the state of Nevada, and we also have a really unique focus.

We have a research center that's dedicated to art and environment.

A few years ago we saw a major article in "The New York Times" about this huge ichthyosaur skull that had been excavated in the desert of Nevada, and we soon realized the paleontologist behind that was Dr. Martin Sander from Bonn, Germany.

These special fossil finds from Nevada often get taken out of Nevada, and housed elsewhere at museums in California, in Utah, and we wanted to find a way to bring those back, bring them close to their point of origin and to create an entire exhibition.

And an experience around this animal we know as the ichthyosaur.

- What is an ichthyosaur?

The name means simply the fish lizard.

The ichthyosaurs of the Jurassic look very familiar to us they look like a modified dolphin, but the ones from Nevada from the Triassic period, is something that has evolved before in a group called mosasaurus.

So it's really kind of a sea monster design.

It's a fierce head, and then a very long body with four fins.

It has a long thin snout and there is an enormous eye that is nine inches in diameter.

So like this, a large eye will indicate one of two things or two things together, either high visual acuity or low light conditions.

For low light, you can do two things.

You can either be active at night, or you can go deep into the ocean.

These giant eyes evolved very early on, and then there remained a hallmark of ichthyosaur evolution to the end of when they died out, about 90 million years ago.

(gentle music) - Dr. Martin Sander is a paleontologist who has been working here in Nevada for over 30 years.

He continues to return to Nevada because Nevada truly is one of the globe's epicenters for research when it comes to ichthyosaur fossils and paleontology.

- Martin Sander has found 80% of all the ichy fossils in Nevada over the period of the last 30 years.

- In August of 2024, we convened a group of journalists and paired them with Dr. Martin Sander for a trip out to the Augusta Mountains.

You really can't fathom the scale of the desert and the location where these fossils are found until you see it in person.

- From my personal experience, I have fun asking the people, "Do you know where the Augusta Mountains are?"

(laughs) The Augusta Mountains are a small and extremely remote mountain range of Nevada.

And to visualize the remoteness, basically it's two hours east of Lovelock, two hours south of Winnemucca, and then it's three hours northwest of Austin, and three hours northeast of Fallon.

If you look around, none of the mountains here is quite as rugged as this one.

The good news is that it gives us the steep slopes that will provide us with the fossils.

If we want to find fossils, we don't want to have grass growing on them.

We want to see the bare rock or the bare dirt.

The bad news is that we have to climb it or fly.

(upbeat music) (helicopter humming) (helicopter whirring) (upbeat music continues) (helicopter humming) Today we are in the far reaches near the end of Favret Canyon, in the Augusta Mountains, and we are an altitude that's nearly 6,000 feet in a ichthyosaur quarry.

The fossil that is largely taken out from here is a big ichthyosaur, nickname, Martin 1.

- [Person] For each of these fossils, of course we keep a field log plus a photo album.

(camera clicks) (brush swishing) - [Martin] So you see how heavy these blocks are.

- Probably like this, right?

- [Martin] Does it give you a fit?

I think it must be something like that.

- Hmm, (indistinct) push it further?

- Right.

Yeah, I think that's looks pretty good.

Okay, so we'll leave it like this.

We left part of this in the field, which we knew, but we didn't know about that bone.

And sometimes it's really hard to see these bones because- - It was dark too.

- It was dark.

And because they're very black in the rock and when they weather, then they begin, their color becomes much more obvious.

We have some ribs that we had sort of reflect the discovery situation.

(gentle music) - I think one of the most important parts of the process of doing "Deep Time" was trekking out to the desert with Martin and his scientists to the site where the specimens are still in the rock, and then spending the day there and coming back with a little tiny rock and then coming back the three and a half hours down the mountains again to the base camp.

So this is really skin in the game and I think it's not convenient, it's inconvenient, but that really gives you almost like a physical appreciation for what you're actually dealing with.

- These fossils from the Nevada desert became ever more important.

And then eventually the idea grew that we should display them to the public and in particular the people of Nevada.

And this then came to pass in a cooperation between the Naturalist History Museum in Los Angeles, and the Nevada Museum of Art.

(enchanting music) - "Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada" is a major exhibition in our 10,000 square feet of galleries.

When we started putting this exhibition together, we knew that it had to be something special because it was going to be in an art museum.

And so we invited Nik Hafermaas to collaborate on the design so that it would take us beyond a traditional natural history museum exhibition.

- I grew up in Germany's probably most boring city, called Kassel, which would turn every five years into Germany's most exciting city because it's home of Documenta.

And Documenta is one of the biggest international art fairs, contemporary art, big installations.

And it would transform the whole place for a hundred days.

And for me as a child, it was so fascinating, 'cause of course, you know from this perspective, everything is much bigger and you don't ask why something is, you just take it in, and you're just fascinated in wonderment.

Recreating this kind of wonderment and fascination that's my driver for designing exhibitions.

- Nik is excellent at crafting these experiences within the gallery so that you're looking at objects, but you're also moving beyond the basic facts about that particular artifact or specimen in the exhibition.

- I'm most interested in how the digital finds its way into the physical, and how the physical finds its way back into the digital, and trying to find, capture the essence of the digital and bring it back into the space and make it tangible and to somehow relate to our human scale and our human sophistication as people who have so many different senses at the same time, that's something that that I'm really passionate about.

- We titled the exhibition "Deep Time," because we are asking our visitors to look back in time, 250 million years.

This was a time when Nevada was completely submerged beneath the waters of an ancient ocean.

- "Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada" is an exploration on scale.

I would say it's an exploration of physical scale and for me, even more importantly, as in the title, it's an exploration of timescale in relationship to our own timescale as human beings.

We're talking about 250 million years.

So for me to imagine a thousand years, a 10,000 years, a hundred thousand years, a million years, 10 million years, and so on, and so on.

It is so abstract.

We're so caught up in our daily lives, in our very narrow view of the world that we sometimes miss the the big picture and "Deep Time" is about the big picture.

- "Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada" looks at these fossils from both a scientific and an art perspective.

We have historical organization of the ichthyosaur finds, starting with the oldest finds by miners and by the King Survey in the 1860s.

And then we have three big bays, the first one being the work of John C Merriam and Annie Alexander in the Humboldt Range, mainly in a 1905 expedition.

Then we have the '50s and '60s work at Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park by Charles Camp as the second bay.

And then the third bay is the work of my team in the Augusta Mountains since 1991.

(gentle music) The whole process of ichthyosaur collection is embodied by this place here, Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park.

Charles Camp, professor of vertebrae paleontology, came to this place on a tip by a lady from Fallon on reporting ichthyosaurs.

And then he spent probably about six field seasons out of this place here, excavating ichthyosaur fossils.

We are here at the fossil shelter at Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park, and its general purpose is to preserve some of the ichthyosaur fossils in place.

We have ichthyosaur bones in the ground.

The most recent analysis found that we're probably looking at seven skeletons.

So we have ribs here.

I mean there's a rib cage here and there are also some ribs here.

The upper arm bones of these ichthyosaurs are just very short and stout.

This here is the shoulder girdle.

So here basically what we have here.

So then this is one of the upper arm bones.

This is the other upper arm bone.

Why is this place important?

Because when Camp started here in the 1950s, then he recognized these are very large, and that was the first glimpse where it became really clear.

Triassic ichthyosaurs are much bigger than the Jurassic ones.

Nevada is sort of my second home, because I've never tallied up how many weeks or months in the end I have spent out in the Augusta Mountains in our camp, and I've also learned to love the people of Nevada.

And I'm super happy now that the first time, really the people in a large scale get to see what is found in this state.

- [Ann] When you encounter this exhibition, you'll not only encounter original fossils, spectacular fossils that have never been seen before, but you might turn the corner and encounter a historical painting, and then you might see a large scale digital immersive installation by a contemporary artist that really brings these animals to life.

- We will see in the show, animations of these animals in full scale.

(enchanting music) It's just white dots on the black background.

So it is super abstract.

And Ivan, who's the computer genius of the animations, of the projections, he actually used a game engine.

It's called the Unreal Engine in all the highly sophisticated computer games that feel super realistic.

I said, "I just want to see white dots that make up these gigantic animals."

So he had to basically make the Unreal, unreal again, or take the realism, the pseudo realism out of the 3D out of it and turn it into the abstraction that we see now.

And with that, we have the advantage that we can relate to, because they swim, they move, they seem to react to us as an audience.

I wanted to create an atmosphere that helps you to suspend disbelief.

I wanted to recreate the sense of the three desert mountain ranges of Nevada where these specimens have been found.

And I took these characteristic mountain lines of these different mountain ranges.

And then I wanted to use the humblest material that you can possibly find, OSB boards, which are these very rough industrial wooden planks.

So I wanted to use this very humble material that somehow gets erected in the desert and create the mountain ranges of the desert out of them.

I like to work with a certain level of abstraction, but one that is very relatable and tangible and that opens up the fantasy of the audience.

- Paleo art is really unique in the history of art.

It represents the attempt by artists to visualize prehistoric creatures.

Paleo artists typically work with scientists using the most up-to-date data that's available.

And so what we see a lot of in paleo art is these representations of prehistoric creatures like ichthyosaurs evolving over time.

- Paleo art always visualizes consciously or unconsciously scientific hypotheses.

Could ichthyosaurs, like the one hanging from the ceiling, could they go on land?

You see that visualization until about 1890 or so.

And then it became understood that ichthyosaurs were not able to go on land at all.

(upbeat music) - Within the exhibition, we really wanted to amplify the importance of women in science.

Many people know the name Mary Anning.

She was a British paleontologist working in the 1800s, but during her time, she was really under-recognized and not really acknowledged in her field, because the field of paleontology was primarily reserved for men.

And so Mary Anning did excavate many early ichthyosaur fossils and we're really lucky to have at least one cast of the fossils that she collected in our exhibition.

One section of the exhibition is dedicated to a female paleontologist, Annie Alexander, who was very active in Nevada in the early 1900s.

In fact, she led an entire expedition in 1905 to the Humboldt Range, where they excavated over 25 ichthyosaur fossils.

But her name is really relatively unknown in the state of Nevada.

And so we have brought together a lot of her personal effects, her photographic scrapbook from that trip, and many of the fossils that they excavated during those travels.

(upbeat music) In conjunction with the exhibition, we've published a children's book on Annie Alexander.

We worked with an amazing Reno based artist, Kate O'Hara, to bring Annie to life.

During the process, Kate spent a lot of time looking through Annie Alexander's original from Nevada, all of the photographs that she took during her trip here, and also just really immersing herself in the Nevada landscape.

- Ann gave me a lot of information about Annie Alexander, and a lot of her journals and scrapbooks that she'd made.

So a lot of that really informed the illustrations in the book and did some amazing writing for the book.

So that really informed where we went with the illustrations as well.

I think the page that I like the most is probably the ocean scene where you get kind of the view of the ichy and the ammonite swimming in the background and some of the like different sea life that might've been in the Great Basin at the time.

So that's probably my favorite page.

This was my first time creating a kid's book.

I wanted to create something that was really colorful and fun, and then all of my work is like very detailed and has lots of different nature elements.

So I wanted to make sure I brought some of that feel into it as well.

And then also keep like historically accurate to the digs that they were doing in 1905 and bring in some of those like aspects of what Annie Alexander's digs would've looked like.

(upbeat music continues) - One of the really special moments in the exhibition is this room that's dedicated to thousands of vintage toy dinosaurs.

And this collection was assembled beginning in 1956, when a young boy named Jack Arata, and his family traveled out to the brand new Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park.

And it was that visit that sparked this lifelong interest, curiosity in prehistoric creatures.

And I think having this amazing collection of toys on view is really just a testament to the whole idea of dinosaurs and prehistoric life, how it can elicit the spirit of discovery in young children and adults alike.

(gentle music) - Such joy to be here today and what an effort to put all this together.

I am David Walker, I'm the CEO of the Nevada Museum of Art, and we expect a huge turnout from the region, but also from around the globe for this exhibition.

- There's absolutely something for everyone in this exhibition, whether you are a lover of geology, whether you have an interest in paleontology, whether you love art and history.

But I think what's also fascinating is that we really delve into the popularity of the ichthyosaur in our collective imaginations.

- What I hope that people get away with is two things.

One, that Nevada is really such an amazing place for this aspect of paleontological research.

The other thing is the intersection of art history and science.

I feel my personal observation, science is driven by beauty.

- When we started here with "Deep Time," I didn't know anything about dinosaurs then you know, from school books or watching "Jurassic Park."

So you start ignorant and you want to keep that, maybe not ignorance, but naivete intact while you are diving into the subject matter, because at the end of the day, you're doing a translation.

It will be boring to do a show by experts for experts.

These kind of shows translate a deep subject matter and bring it up to the surface and make it relatable.

- If you ask me what is the most favorite part for this exhibition, for me personally, is I get to see a reunion of the fossils that I've collected over the 30 years in one place.

- Nevada has an amazing community of very active paleontologists as well as museums, that are dedicated to telling all of these different stories related to the ichthyosaur.

However, I think this is really the first major exhibition that brings all of those voices together.

So we've been fortunate to work with partners across museums and different fields, to really celebrate this beloved state fossil that we all know as the ichthyosaur.

(gentle music) - To learn more about the exhibit "Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada," visit nevadaart.org.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

If you want to watch new "ARTEFFECTS" segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel, and don't forget to keep visiting PBSreno.org to watch complete episodes of "ARTEFFECTS."

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan, thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Funding for "ARTEFFECTS" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, with Bill Pearce Motors.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

(upbeat music) In memory of Sue McDowell, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)