54-5 Lost Collections, Lost Worlds: Fossils of the Joe Webb Peoples Museum, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT

Session: New Approaches to Old Fossil Collections

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Fossil collections have been part of Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) since its establishment in 1831. Wesleyan opened its natural history museum in 1871, in a building funded by agricultural chemist Orange Judd. Judd's son-in-law, ichthyologist George Brown Goode, became the first curator (1871-1877). He went on to make a distinguished career in museum science, becoming assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in charge of the US National Museum. From 1871 to 1910 museum collections increased precipitously, through donations from the USNM and specimens supplied by curator S Ward Loper, a self-taught collector of Connecticut Triassic-Jurassic fish. He combined curator-ship with work for the USGS, and on his travels collected extensively for the Wesleyan Museum (late Eocene plants and insects, Florissant, CO; fish, plants and insects, early Eocene Green River Formation, WY), obtained collections from Mazon Creek (IL; Pennsylvanian plants) and Crawfordsville (IN; Mississippian crinoids), and with Charles D. Walcott sampled Ordovician vertebrates and invertebrates in the Harding Sandstone (Canyon City, CO). 

Interest in collections waned in the 1930s, and the museum closed in 1957. Specimens were returned to the NMNH, put on indefinite loan or donated to schools and other museums, or stored in an unsecured basement. Many specimens were found to have been lost or damaged when geological collections were transferred to a new building in 1971, but collections were not inventoried. In 2017, enthusiastic undergraduate and MSc students started to inventory and digitize the collections, making information in accession books and library archives available in Specify and adding photographs. They constructed exhibits in the museum and elsewhere on campus (e.g., display of Ward's casts of plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, a mosasaur and Glyptodon), conducted Open Houses  for alumni and prospective students, advertised our fossil collections throughout campus so that faculty outside the sciences (arts, history, history of science) started to use our collections in teaching, and assisted in teaching activities in the Middletown community.  

The paleontological community may, through our Specify portal, become aware of our 'lost' collections of never-studied material from lagerstaette, and students in a range of disciplines are enthusiastically discovering multiple 'lost worlds': extinct life forms, their ecosystems and evolution, but also history and evolution of late 19^th - early 20^th century science and scientists, at Wesleyan and in the world.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-9536

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