UW-Madison Geology Museum

The UW-Madison Geology Museum (UWGM) has the second highest attendance of any museum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, exceeded only by the Chazen Museum of Art. The museum is housed with the rest of the Department of Geology and Geophysics in Weeks Hall, at the corner of Charter and Dayton streets, in the southwest of the UW campus.

The museum charges no admission. Its main undertakings are exhibits, outreach to the public, and research.

History

The museum was founded in the 19th century, and resided with the rest of earth science in Science Hall, which is near Lake Mendota toward the east end of campus. After the construction of Weeks Hall in the 1970s, the museum moved to its present location in 1981.

Exhibits

Almost 1,000 items are on display in 66 exhibits covering 3,000 square feet. There are major areas devoted to rocks and minerals, invertebrate and fish fossils, and vertebrate fossils. There are also cases devoted to glaciers, meteorites, and fossil plants.

Highlights include the following:

*An excellent specimen of the mineral kermesite, donated by John Barlow.

*Two glacial erratic pieces of copper weighing hundreds of pounds each.

*A case exhibiting 85 minerals from the recent Greiner donation.

*A blacklight room that shines both long-wave and short-wave ultraviolet onto rocks in a case, demonstrating fluorescence and phosphorescence.

*A walk-through model of a limestone cave, complete with sound effects.

Fossils

*Several stromatolites from the Ordovician of southwestern Wisconsin.

*A slab of seafloor from the Cretaceous of Texas, containing impressions of many clams.

*Shells of giant the cephalopod "Endoceras" from Wisconsin.

*The type specimen of the cephalopod "Actinoceras beloitense".

*A window showing the workings of the preparation laboratory (prep lab) where vertebrate fossils collected in the field are cleaned for storage or display.

*Animals from the Burgess Shale, including the chordate "Pikaia", the hyolith "Haplophrentis", and fragments of the stem-arthropod "Anomalocaris"

The museum has several skeletons from the Cretaceous Niobrara chalk of Kansas:
*"Hesperornis", a swimming bird with teeth.

*A slab of chalk containing the shark "Squalicorax", including its teeth, vertebrae, and some bones from its last meal.

*An exceptionally well-preserved slab of a floating colony of the sea lily "Uintacrinus".

*A nearly complete skeleton of the mosasaur "Platycarpus", suspended from the ceiling. It has some distinctive pathologies, including injured ribs and a rear right flipper with arthritis.

*A suspended replica of the pterosaur "Pteranodon".

There are also many vertebrates skeletons from other places:
*The Permian reptile "Captorhinus".

*A composite skeleton of the duck-billed dinosaur "Edmontosaurus", the first dinosaur on display in Wisconsin.

*The Boaz Mastodon, a Pleistocene relative of elephants found in 1897 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin.

Extraterrestrial Exhibits

*A large fragment of the Canyon Diablo meteorite that left Meteor Crater in Arizona.

*Several small meteorites, both stony and metallic, that fell in Wisconsin.

Outreach

Every year, hundreds of school groups from around the state come to the museum for tours led by student guides. Staff and students at the museum also travel to schools in the area to teach both children and their teachers about geology.

The museum also opens its doors to periodic family events, such as the annual Open House. These sometimes have a special theme, such as open house in April 2006, which focused on pterosaurs.

Research

The museum has conducted fossil digs in many Western states. The Late Cretaceous Niobrara Formation in Kansas has yielded many marine fossils. The Hell Creek Formation in Montana and South Dakota has produced duck-billed, horned, and tyrannosaurid dinosaurs, as well as some noteworthy fish.

There is an ongoing summer dig in the Jurassic Morrison Formation in Wyoming, which has produced sauropod and theropod dinosaurs, as well as other remarkable vertebrates.

The museum also conducts local research, such as the study of Pleistocene mammal fossils from Midwestern caves.

Collections

Like most museums, the Geology Museum has far more specimens stored in its collections than on display. It has a majority of the meteorites ever collected in Wisconsin, and an abundance of rocks and minerals collected by faculty and donated by friends of the museum.

The museum's fossils include impressive collections from the White River Badlands, the Santana Formation of Brazil, a remarkable Silurian soft-bodied fauna from a quarry near Waukesha.

External links

* [http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~museum/ Official site of the Geology Museum]