A new exhibition at the Peoria Riverfront Museum showcases sharks, from the 5.5-inch pocket shark to the 33-foot whale shark.
Sharks features more than 70 models of shark species such as the megalodon, great white and whale shark. The traveling exhibition comes from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Renae Kerrigan, curator of science and planetarium director at the Peoria Riverfront Museum, said she hopes the exhibition clears up some misconceptions about sharks. She said movies such as Jaws create fear around sharks.
“In reality, there’s only about 10 fatalities related to sharks in a year,” she said. “And many hundreds of thousands of sharks can die in a year based on human activity, so they have more to fear from us than we have to fear from them.”
Kerrigan said she learned a lot about sharks during the process of setting up the exhibit. One of the most surprising was the Greenland shark, which scientists believe could live to be up to 500 years old.
“An animal that has lived on our planet for longer than the United States has been a country,” she said. “One more wild thing about them is there’s a crustacean that will attack their eyes. And so then they frequently go blind, so they survive with a very keen sense of smell and hearing. And so they’re these ancient blind sharks that are thriving in the cold oceans around Greenland.”
She said her favorite part of the exhibition is the life size whale shark model.
“Whale sharks are fascinating creatures,” she said. “They’re beautiful. They’re huge. The female whale shark can get to 50 feet long. And they’re filter feeders. So you don’t think of sharks as being filter feeders, but whale sharks have these huge mouths that open up and they can they filter feed on plankton.”
John Morris, president and CEO of the Peoria Riverfront Museum, said he hopes the exhibition sparks curiosity about sharks.
“Whether we make shark experts out of the young girl who comes in here and the school children that come in and the families that come in, that’s not the point of the museum. The point of the museum is to spark learning,” he said.
The exhibition features interactive exhibits for families. It also has fossils, including a megalodon tooth discovered by a Peoria child in Virginia. The tooth is one of the largest found to date.