The Joe Webb Peoples Fossil Collection

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

The Joe Webb Peoples collections here at Wesleyan contain an incredible amount and variety of corals, ranging in age through the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic eras to the late 1800s. These corals can tell us many things about Earth’s environments in the past, from just before the industrial age back to the far distant past. … Read more

Our Wesleyan natural history collections include many taxidermy specimens of birds (‘stuffed birds’), some of which can be admired in display cases along the hall ways of Shanklin, 2nd floor. Other were stored haphazardly in the storage room on the 3d floor of Exley, on top of display cases in the Joe Webb Peoples Museum … Read more

MARINE LIZARD: MOSASAUR Or the Meuse Lizard Ward Cast: Original in Natural History Museum Paris Mosasaurus hoffmanni Mantell 1829 Maastricht, Netherlands.  Late Cretaceous ~66 million years ago     This Mosasaur cast  is a replica of the first described specimen of a Mosasaur, with the original on exhibit in the Natural History Museum in Paris. … Read more

In that past, too many students and faculty have been unaware of the existence of the amazing Wesleyan Natural History Collections (including those in the Joe Webb Peoples museum) on the 4th Floor of Exley. This year, for the first time, we try to do something about this, and are aiming to make incoming students … Read more

Crinoid specimen in the Joe Webb Peoples Museum (donated by Henry I Nettleton). Over the last few weeks, a second step in the dramatic reorganization of Wesleyan’s natural history collections has been undertaken. The old cabinets housing an extensive array of minerals, fossils and archaeological and ethnological specimens were falling into disrepair. With the green … Read more

Wesleyan’s natural history collections, which have begun to emerge into public and accessible spaces on campus in the last few years, are extensive, and include fossils, minerals, stuffed animals, bones, and animals in bottles with alcohol. We have only just scratched the surface of these collections, with the discovery and restoration projects of the Glyptodon … Read more

Egg-collecting was a mania in Victorian England, and collectors such as Lord Rothschild collected 11,750 egg-sets in his curiosity collection. Naturally, collectors in America followed suit, and egg shells became a staple in museum cabinets. The former Wesleyan Museum in Judd Hall housed a large bird egg collection, most of which were deaccessioned and sent … Read more