Museum A science museum, the Red Mountain Museum, was opened on the slope adjacent to the cut in 1971. Interpretive signage was installed along one of the terraces of the cut and guardrails and fencing installed to allow museum visitors to inspect the exposed rock close-up. From the late 1970s until 1994, the Red Mountain Museum was quite active in paleontological research, collecting fossil vertebrates and invertebrates from hundreds of localities throughout the state. The staff collected and cataloged tens of thousands of fossils, including many Cretaceous mosasaurs, Pleistocene ground sloths, and primitive Eocene archaeocete whales. Paleontologists, zoologists, geologists and archeologists once employed at the Red Mountain Museum, either as paid staff or as volunteers, include its first curator Whitman Cross, Gorden L. Bell, Jr., James P. Lamb, Winston C. Lancaster, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Susan Henson, and Amy Sheldon. The Red Mountain Museum later formed a partnership with a nearby children's science museum, The Discovery Place, to form "Discovery 2000", which then moved away from Red Mountain to downtown Birmingham and became the McWane Science Center which opened on July 11, 1998. In 1987 the Red Mountain Expressway Cut was granted National Natural Landmark status by the National Park Service. Deemed unsafe because of the potential for rock slides, the interpretive trail has since been closed to the public. The extensive Red Mountain Museum collection is now stored at the McWane Science Center and once again available to scientists. As of October 2007, the former Red Mountain Museum building had been demolished, but plans for the site are unknown. Literary allusions The fantasy writer and paleontologist Caitlín R. Kiernan has used Red Mountain, particularly the area west of U.S. Route 31 and the Red Mountain cut, as the setting for four of her novels – Silk (1998), Threshold (2001), Low Red Moon (2003), and, to a much lesser extent, Murder of Angels (2004). The geography and geology of the mountain was integral to the plot of Threshold, and in a chapbook on the novel (Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold; Subterranean Press, 2003), Kiernan includes an afterword describing the geological history and paleontology of the Paleozoic strata of Red Mountain. Fannie Flagg's 2010 novel I Still Dream About You features Red Mountain prominently. References Further reading External links Red Mountain Park Defunct museums in Alabama Geology of Alabama Geography of Birmingham, Alabama Historic American Engineering Record in Alabama Landforms of Jefferson