UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- When Erin DiMaggio was an undergraduate student, she had a summer internship with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Little did the 19-year-old know then that one day she would help develop a permanent exhibit for the museum.
DiMaggio, now an assistant research professor of geosciences in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, has an exhibit featured in the museum’s “The David H. Koch Hall of Fossils - Deep Time,” which reopened this summer.
Closed in 2014 for remodeling, the new, immersive 31,000-square-foot dinosaur and fossil hall explores the story of Earth’s deep past and tracks the history of life on this planet.
Visitors to the “How Do We Date Fossils?” exhibit are greeted by a large headshot of DiMaggio smiling and photos of field work in Africa. Informative panels teach visitors about the primary methods of dating; relative dating — a method that uses the position of fossils within rock layers to determine their age — and absolute dating — the method that uses radioactive minerals in rocks as geological clocks.