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The Smithsonian exhibit “Sea Monsters Unearthed: Life in Angola’s Ancient Seas” opened in 2018 and will close at the end of 2023. The Smithsonian will then refurbish the exhibit for a ten-city tour of the US prior to its return to Angola. Prior to the pandemic, the exhibit had been viewed by over 4.5 million visitors. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Angolan Embassy in Washington D.C. requested that a four-minute video telling the story of Sea Monsters Unearthed be produced for their website, where it played on the masthead through the pandemic.

A five-minute looping video "Unearthing Angola’s Sea Monsters" made in Dallas, Texas thanks to former ISEM Trustee Ray Marr and video editor Edd Chappell, introduces the exhibit. In the video, former SMU students Reagan Long, Yasmin Jackson, Myria Perez, and Evan Snyder share their stories of lab work through interviews provided by SMU.

February 24, 2023 DALLAS (SMU) Internationally-known for his exquisite Black Masking Mardi Gras suits, got his inspiration for this year’s suit from an unlikely source: fossils of ancient creatures discovered in Angola. Chief Shaka saw the remains from the large, prehistoric marine reptiles in an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The fossils from the Cretaceous Era were found by SMU paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs and Michael J. Polcyn and others. Chief Shaka was particularly struck by the fact that Mosasaurs -- the same type of giant sea creatures featured in the “Sea Monsters Unearthed: Life in Angola’s Ancient Seas” exhibit -- had also been discovered in Louisiana. "From Angola to Louisiana, history is repeating itself," Chief Shaka noted.