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Since 2004, Joel Bartsch has served as president and CEO of the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Coordinating the efforts of several curators, Joel A. Bartsch focuses on creating immersive, educational exhibits.
Among the museum’s permanent exhibits is the Morian Hall of Paleontology, which brings together a wide-ranging collection of fossils and casts, from marine trilobites to dinosaurs.
One of the highlights of the hall is a full 9-foot-tall, 11-foot-wide jaw of a Megalodon, an extinct shark species that lived from 20 million to 2 million years ago. Going extinct during a major ice age, when glaciers covered much of the planet, the Megalodon was one of the largest predators to inhabit the Earth’s oceans.
Just as with today’s sharks, the Megalodon had a skeleton made of cartilage, instead of bone, which has left researchers with very little to study except for its fossilized teeth. The unique Megalodon specimen on display at HMNS represents the life work of jeweler and fossil hunter Vito Bertucci, who collected 182 fossilized Megalodon teeth over two decades. Bertucci ultimately set the teeth in a fiberglass frame that derives its spacial dimensions from the great white shark.
