At Wesleyan University
In November 2024 we switched from exhibiting a ‘Specimen of the Month’ in the Science Library to a’Collection Highlight’ – we never seemed to be ready with a new exhibit on a monthly basis. The first collection highlight, on display from November 2024 through February 2025 was a beautiful specimen of native copper from the … Read more
To celebrate the 2025 Open House, we placed our new Collection Highlight in the Science Library:a regal fritillary (Speyera idalia, Drury), from the George Browne Goode Biological Collections.
Johan C Varekamp, Minerals Curator of the Joe Webb Peoples Natural History Museum, Wesleyan University (submitted by E. Thomas) The association between movies and minerals is not an intuitively straightforward concept, although many movies deal one way or another with diamonds (stolen or not), but about that another time. I was struck by two recent … Read more
The Joe Webb Peoples Museum celebrated Earth Day by presenting a new Specimen-Of-The-Month, a piping plover (Charadrius melodus) from the George Brown Goode Biological Collections. Piping Plovers are considered Endangered in the Great Lakes region and Threatened in the remainder of its U.S. breeding range, including Connecticut.
Blog by Johan C Varekamp, Smith Curator of Mineralogy and Petrology of the Joe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History, and Harold T Stearns Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Emeritus The Joe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History has a significant number of minerals from the pegmatite quarries from the direct surroundings of Middletown. … Read more
When we first placed Shelley, the Glyptodon, in front of the Science Library in the lobby of Exley in February 2018, we planned to add the skeleton and carapace of her extant (alive today) cousin, a nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus Linnaeus 1758). We finally succeeded: Shelley now has the company of her much smaller relative. … Read more
Our specimen of the month for March is virtual – no exhibit of actual specimens in the Wesleyan Science Library. But use the QR codes to see them in 3D..
If there is a hashtag that defines museum practices of the 21st century, it’d better be #digitization. With the leaps and bounds computing power has taken in the past decade, researchers have been getting on the ramp of creating large online biodiversity databases for collection objects. An example is the Integrated Digital Biocollections (iDigBio) … Read more
As I embarked on my butterfly project earlier this month, one of my fellow students came to me with a predicament. He sent me an email with pictures of two of our butterfly specimens that were marked as different species, but to both of our untrained eyes, looked exactly the same. He was hoping I … Read more