After a 43-year career at the Natural History Museum in Toulouse, Francis Duranton is retiring. The paleontologist and director of the museum returns to four decades rich in great meetings and changes. The person who will succeed him has not yet been named.
You owe your career to a shell…tell us.
I was 8 years old and in the foundations of the future family home I found a fossil shell. I didn’t know what it was. By discovering this world, I discovered the universe of dinosaurs. I told myself this was what I wanted to do.
After schooling in Los I continued my studies at the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. I also received my approval for direct research after completing a thesis at the Practical School of Advanced Studies in Montpellier. I was already working in the museum, I was hired as a seasonal at the age of 20.
A recruitment that follows an interview with the special…
My interview lasted 45 seconds. We were three candidates when the director took us to her office. We stood. She turned to us: “Please arrange the interview equipment”, I sat down, the other two candidates did the same. She then asked me, “We still teach you this in school?” “Of course, Mademoiselle,” I replied, “they are the precious ridiculous ones and I have no doubt that you look at yourself in your Grace’s reflection every morning.” “Very good: you are hired.” The three of us knew each other, our travels were similar, she chose literature for us.
When you were 20, did you imagine that your entire career would be in a museum?
I didn’t know what I wanted to do exactly, but very quickly, I realized that the collections of this museum were extraordinary. I said to myself: Why go anywhere else when everything is here? In 1998 the renovation project came to fruition and there were no more reasons to leave.
Can you share some striking memories?
Punch, an elephant who was naturalized in 1910, was featured at the top of the museum. In the early 2000s, we took advantage of roof repair to take it out with a special crane. We put it on a lowered truck and left it in a hangar at night. It was necessary to make the streets wrong: the police were mobilized. It was replaced in 2008 when the museum reopened.
At the beginning of my appointment, I also remember the joy of having to discover the secret passage that left the second floor in the bottom of a window and made it possible to join the church of Saint-Exupère. We found graffiti from resistance fighters watching the Gestapo headquarters from the museum.
And there were also extraordinary meetings…
It was a pleasure to work with Yves Coppens, who sent us to Mongolia with my colleague José Braga, where there was a very special deposit. I also had the opportunity to spend three days with Théodore Monod evoking the Mehabies. There were also meetings with the artistic environment. Luc Besson wanted to shoot a sequence for the big blue and when he saw naturalized animals he said he couldn’t stay here because it was too hard to see them motionless.
In parallel to your career in the museum, you have led many excavations. Tell us.
Throughout my career I have developed excavation sites. One of the best moments of my career involves a bail I discovered in the Gers. There were five new species, including one last year.
I have participated in many projects around the world. The 1995 excavations in Pakistan were exceptional despite the difficulty of the expedition. We were lucky enough to rediscover the remains of the largest mammal to ever exist on the planet’s surface: the Paraceratherium. Since then I have worked a lot in southern Africa searching for fossil hominids. It will take care of me in the years to come.
What are your projects apart from excavations?
I didn’t plan everything. I plan to write works of memoir and popularization of paleontology. It will depend on the opportunities that arise. In any case, I would continue paleontology, that’s for sure, and I will continue to follow very closely what is being done in the museum.
Do you know who will give you success?
My successor has not yet been named. My final departure is May 1st. There I go on an end-activity vacation. It is important to make room for my successor. I’m becoming a man from another time, which is normal.