As Hawaii football players prepare to take on the Gators this weekend, UF is preparing to send a 60-foot-long metal shark in their direction.
After being on display for seven months and attracting more than 115,000 visitors, the Florida Museum of Natural History's megalodon exhibit will leave next week from its Gainesville home to the first stop on its traveling tour: Honolulu.
The exhibit, called "Megalodon: Largest Shark that Ever Lived," showcases a model of an extinct, prehistoric shark that will take three 40-foot-long containers to move, said Tom Kyne, the museum's traveling exhibits coordinator.
The exhibit contains fossils, artifacts, full-scale models of sharks and a 60-foot-long metal sculpture of an adult megalodon that visitors can walk through, according to the museum's Web site.
It is scheduled to arrive at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii on Sept. 24. Two weeks and two crew members will be needed to set it up, Kyne said.
Bruce MacFadden, curator of vertebrate paleontology for the museum, and a team of about 24 designers, writers and builders created the exhibit.
The exhibit debuted at the Florida Museum of Natural History in June 2007 and remained on display until January.
Since January, MacFadden said they have been making adjustments to the exhibit and stabilizing the structures to make them more portable.
Honolulu is the first stop on the exhibit's tour of the U.S., which MacFadden hopes will last five years.
He said the exhibit will then travel to Miami, and the Florida Museum of Natural History is in the process of booking other venues as well.
The cost for a museum to rent "Megalodon" is around $80,000 for a 12- to 16-week period, Kyne said.
