At Wesleyan University
There is a large amount of archival material telling many stories about the Joe Webb Peoples Museum, and the old collections of the Wesleyan Museum of Natural History, which closed in 1957. Lilly Hochhauser (’25) is working with the Wesleyan Special Collections and Archives to digitize and safely store this material. One example of material … Read more
This article was retrieved from the website’s archives; it was written and published by Professor Ellen Thomas on 2023/07/30. The Joe Webb Peoples Museum has a large collection of Ward’s casts of fossils. In 1871, more than 900 were bought by Orange Judd for exhibit in the new museum. Many were lost after the closure … Read more
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..