Surely you’ve seen someone post about it over the past few days, and now I am. The 12 foot high, 15 foot long woolly mammoth statue was installed just outside the Natural History Building yesterday, after it’s creation at Taylor Studios in Rantoul.
From The Daily Illini:
The proposal to erect a mammoth sculpture came from a committee set up by Facilities & Services in 2015, which included Marshak, administrators from the schools who use the Natural History Building, representatives from Facilities & Services and a professor in FAA. According to Marshak, the idea was first proposed by Marshak and Fred Delcomyn, the then-director of the School of Integrative Biology.
Funds to pay for the project came from the state’s “Art-In-Architecture” program, which requires that a percentage of the budget from major construction projects on campus go towards the purchase of art. The Mammoth’s funding stemmed from the renovation of the Natural History Building in 2014.
It might have taken a few years, but now the statue has become a reality. According to the Illinois State Geological Survey, woolly mammoths were common in Illinois 40,000 to 10,000 years ago.
This isn’t the first large object to exist in Champaign-Urbana. There is of course the Kraft macaroni noodle, the C-U Adventures in Time and Space Puzzle-saurus, and the Dallas & Company dinosaur. We’re no Casey, Illinois, but I like where we’re headed.