The Joe Webb Peoples Fossil Collection
At Wesleyan University
Our Deinotherium giganteum (Kaup, 1829) specimen (one of our collection of Ward’s Casts, like Shelley the Glyptodon) is under restoration after its long disappearance into storage, starting at the closing of the Wesleyan Natural History museum in Orange Judd Hall of Natural Sciences in 1957. The original from which our cast was made was found in the ‘Deinotherium … Read more
We recently discovered a fascinating framed mount of specimens showing the life cycle of the Ailanthus Silk Moth. As far as we know, it was purchased from a natural history supplies company in New York in the early 20th century. The Ailanthus Silkmoth (Samia cynthia Drury) is an introduced species in North America. It was … Read more
The history of life is a long story to tell, reaching over billions of years, while the history of shelving it is a far more manageable one, reaching over centennia. This exhibition is curated to explore both of these rich histories – the history of life and the history of people trying to ‘arrange … Read more
Fossilisation is nature’s way of preserving traces of once living organisms, humans too have devised ways to intervene with decomposition and to preserve life in a more predictable and accessible manner. We are a species of control freaks. The business of science in the 1800s was to collect and classify all known life on the … Read more
The Joe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History is thrilled to welcome the seminar presenter for the Summer Research in the Sciences programme at Wesleyan – Dr. Warren D. Allmon. Aligning with our current mission of resurrecting Wesleyan’s natural history collections, Dr. Allmon was instrumental in the rejuvenation of the Paleontological Research Institution’s (PRI) internationally-known … Read more
As the Spring comes to an end, we celebrate the fruitful school year that has passed by, once again a little too swiftly. For us at the Joe Webb Peoples museum, nothing is more suitable for this time than to showcase the spectacular specimens that we have been restoring, as well as the exhibits … Read more
Birds are a unique group of creatures. They don’t seem to quite fit the bill for any other major group of animals with which we are familiar. They are warm blooded, but don’t suckle their offsprings like mammals. They lay eggs, but have feathers instead of scales like reptiles. They don’t swim in the water and … Read more
Driving along the highways of Connecticut, many don’t realise that the rocks by the side of the roads holds a looking-glass to one of the most famous times in geological history – the Jurassic Period. The natural landscape of the Newark and Hartford Basins in Connecticut, as it was about 200 million years ago, would … Read more
The labyrinth of tunnels beneath the carefully manicured landscape of Wesleyan has inspired the imagination and indulgence of many generations of students. There is always something about the Forbidden that beckons. Yet there is one secret that our campus holds to which many may not be privy to. Above Level 6 of Exley Science Centre … Read more
Science was not like it is today in the 18th and even 19th century: things people used to do in science at that time – not too long ago -may appear very odd to us. In Wesleyan’s collections lie several keystone artifacts to this rather fascinating episode in history. Before science (as we consider it now) existed, … Read more