The Joe Webb Peoples Fossil Collection
At Wesleyan University
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
Working with fossils, it’s not difficult to think that science is often stranger than fiction. Wesleyan’s new star – our Glyptodon – is something that defies our every expectation of an armadillo. With her domed carapace, exquisite scutes and odd bone projections on her cheeks, she looks like a creature from a science fiction film. Another … Read more
Would you like to snorkel with giant predator reptiles the size of a small airplane? Visit Level 3 of Exley Science Centre, where these spectacular beasts adorn our walls. And fear not, they are models, and the originals from which they are made have been petrified in stone for more than 100 million years. These … Read more
Wesleyan’s remarkable series of fossils casts includes two large specimens of ferocious predatorial reptiles- Plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus. The fossil casts were in a dishearteningly deplorable state when they were rediscovered, crated in the Penthouse of Exley. The casts were put in crates when the Wesleyan Museum closed in 1957. We did not know where they were stored, but they were moved … Read more