Ten thousand years after they last roamed the earth, a family of Cincinnati wooly mammoths is on the move to a new home. But first, they’ll make an appearance in the Cincinnati Reds’ Opening Day Parade.
Most recently located outside the Cincinnati Museum Center’s (CMC) Geier Collections and Research Center in Queensgate, the museum’s family of wooly mammoth statues — two adults and two juveniles — will find a new home at the museum’s new center next door to Union Terminal.
The museum purchased the 200,000-square-foot, 11-acre complex at 1518 Dalton Ave. to turn into a state-of-the-art campus for education, research and collections, as well as a place where the museum can share its research with the community and provide direct-learning opportunities through its collections. It also allows CMC to consolidate and preserve its collection of more than 6 million objects, ranging from historic artifacts to scientific specifications, and provide for future collections growth and diversification.
The wooly mammoths will be installed outside the new center. Mainstays in Cincinnati for over four decades, each mammoth consists of a steel frame wrapped in fiberglass, with bronze powder mixed into the gel coat, creating their mint green patina. The statues are life-size in height, but weigh much less than real mammoths would have — the adult statues weigh about 2,000 pounds while the juveniles weigh around 800. With help from Fenton Rigging, one of the mammoths has already been moved and will be featured in the Opening Day Parade before migrating to the new center.
The two adult mammoth statues will be installed at the center in April. The juveniles will undergo maintenance and repairs before installation.
Cincinnati Museum Center 1301 Western Ave., West End. More info: cincymuseum.org.
This article appears in Mar 19 – Apr 2, 2025.