Old is new again at Fort Worth Museum of Science and History

The little cavemen are back.

Among the artifacts recently pulled from dusty crates in the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History’s warehouse is arguably the most popular exhibit in the museum’s past. The diorama Trepanning: The Primitive Art of Skull Surgery was a must-have for the exhibit Hidden Treasures: Celebrating 75 Years, which opened Saturday.

“All the kids love it,” said Van Romans, the museum’s president. “Trepanning is the most asked-about exhibit we have. The last time any museum guests saw it was in 1998.”

Indeed, for anyone who remembers walking through the museum’s Dr. May Owen Hall of Medical Science from 1965 to its removal about 18 years ago, Trepanning is memorable.

One figure in a quartet of pint-sized Neolithic people straddles and restrains an unfortunate patient, as another performs surgery with a pointed stone tool. Two others invoke the power of prehistoric entities to help their injured friend survive the procedure.

“Hundreds of people have told me that they remember that for one reason or another,” Romans said.

So there was no way museum curators were going to overlook Trepanning as they chose pieces from the 180,000 stored objects to display in the retrospective.

A background soundtrack is rich with Glenn Miller and Roy Rogers tunes, signifying the era from which the museum sprang.

First museum in Cultural District

Hidden Treasures is “a tribute to some of the museum’s iconic artifacts from its extensive permanent collection,” according to a news release.

Romans called the assemblage in the upstairs Special Exhibitions Gallery an homage to “the incredible work of a handful of visionary educators.”

Born with a charter from the Texas Legislature on May 21, 1941, the museum began as a children’s museum in two rooms of De Zavala Elementary School, Romans said. It moved a couple of times before settling on Montgomery Street.

Among Fort Worth residents celebrated in Hidden Treasures is Amon Carter, the Star-Telegram’s founding publisher and a major force behind the museum’s growth. On an undulating wall of historic photos is a frame that captured Carter and others smiling as Carter’s grandsons shared a shovel to break ground for the museum’s first permanent building.

“It was the first museum in what became Fort Worth’s Cultural District,” Romans said.

That building gave way to a campus that now has more than 166,000 square feet of education-filled space. Carter’s shovel was dug up to break ground for the new building and remains in the museum’s collection.

‘The exhibit is us’

Near the Hidden Treasures photo wall is a row of tiny period rooms that will further jog older guests’ memories. One is a classroom scene designed from a photo inside a one-room schoolhouse. Another is a general store that predated the concept of convenience.

Standing proudly on a blue perch is the Spitz Star Projector that for decades carried reclined guests into space in the old planetarium. That attraction succumbed to progress, replaced by a Zeiss System in the new planetarium, said Kit Goolsby, a 35-year-veteran curator who is the museum’s longest-serving employee.

“That star ball was the first planetarium in the Southwest,” Goolsby said. “It was donated by the Junior League in 1949.”

Donations are the common thread among Hidden Treasures exhibits, said Rebecca Rodriguez, a museum spokeswoman.

“So many of the notable items came from Fort Worth families,” Rodriguez said.

And that’s what makes Hidden Treasures so precious, Romans said.

“This exhibit is us,” he said. “It belongs to Fort Worth. It’s all about our families, our values, our place. And it’s terribly important to Fort Worth families.”

This story was originally published May 21, 2016 at 4:03 PM with the headline "Old is new again at Fort Worth Museum of Science and History."