At Wesleyan University
Our tireless obsession to name and categorize things into categories with impermeable and immutable boundaries is perhaps one of our species’ peculiarities: assigning categories to the numerous and diverse forms of life on Earth can be seen as somehow giving us assurance, in creating an illusion that we may be dominant and in control … Read more
We all know there are thousands of fossils and splendid minerals on show in the Joe Webb Peoples Museum on Level 4 of Exley, but with the gazillion obligations in life, it is hard to visit as often as we like. Not to worry, we got you covered: the Wesleyan campus is a fossil treasure … Read more
Only a few decades ago, it would have seemed rather improbable that scientists and students would travel the length and breadth of the world to convene and discuss their work, and especially improbable that they would convene to do so in a meeting 28,000 strong. We live in exciting times. Our group working on … Read more
At long last, we no longer have to think that Shelley the Glyptodon‘s feet are four cylindrical poles. They aren’t! Owing to online shopping, we have managed to obtain modern casts of all her leg bones from the professional fossil replica artists at Gaston Design Inc., who also provided her new head. Over the course … Read more
The natural world is not always generous in revealing its wondrous secrets. From the crystals buried in the depths of the Earth to the star fields behind distant dust clouds, the wonders of nature are often obscured from direct access by people striving to obtain knowledge. It is even more frustrating when such secrets are … Read more
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