A mastodon and a meteor older than Earth are highlights of the UW Geology Museum

If you want to touch a hunk of roughly 4.56-billion-year-old meteorite that predates Earth, view fossilized bones from two mastodons that wandered western Wisconsin during the Ice Age or learn more about the universe, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Geology Museum is well worth a visit. 

More than 10,000 schoolkids, college students and other visitors — sometimes with rocks they’d like identified — come here to prowl the 3,000-square-foot gallery each year, making it the second-most visited museum on the UW campus, bested only by the Chazen Museum of Art. Admission is free. 

Tucked into the Weeks Hall for Geological Sciences on W. Dayton St., the museum has more than 100 tons of rocks and fossilized bones stored in its basement, said Richard Slaughter, the museum’s director. 

Only a fraction of them are on display for obvious reasons, he said, but they include everything from a flying lizard called pterosaurs — which floats in the museum above a mastodon skeleton — to the gnarly looking skull of a predatory marine fish called xiphactinus, to some cool rocks that fluoresce (glow in the dark) when hit with ultraviolet light. 

And that rock that’s older than Mother Earth? It’s from an iron asteroid that had been zipping around space for millions of years before it smashed into the Arizona desert 50,000 years ago, creating the Barringer Crater. Unlike other exhibits, visitors are welcome to give it a pat, so I did. 

Brooke Norsted, the museum’s assistant director, said the researchers at the university began collecting and displaying rocks and fossils from its inception in 1848. H.A. Tenney, who was on the first Board of Regents, wrote that he wanted a “mineral cabinet to showcase the interesting things found in Wisconsin,” she said. He also noted in his missive that “every neighborhood can do something.”

She said bones for the museum’s mastodon skeleton were found by some farm kids in southwest Wisconsin in the 1890s after a major rainstorm washed away the surrounding dirt and partially exposed them. The animal was about the size of an elephant, had long, curved tusks and weighed around five tons. 

“The ‘veterbrate’ room is right outside our offices,” she said. “So we often hear kids gasp when they walk in there and see the skeletons of critters that once lived here in Wisconsin millions of years ago.”

The biggest dinosaur on display, however, isn’t from the Badger State. It was uncovered in Alberta, Canada, and is called the Edmontosaurus because it was found near the city of Edmonton. There’s also a replica of a T. rex skull, nicknamed Stan, that came from South Dakota. 

Wisconsin presumably had these same dinosaurs, Norsted noted, but the rocks from that period that would contain their fossils are missing, eroded away by the elements.

The museum does have examples of some of the oldest fossils on Earth, which may date from nearly 4 billion years ago. They are called stromatolites, a microbial mat formed in shallow water by trapping and binding sedimentary grain by biofilms. 

Norsted, who grew up in Alaska, said friends from home sometimes ask her how she can live and work in the Badger State, which they consider topographically boring. 

“But I think Wisconsin has an amazing geological story to it,” she said. 

“When visitors come, I like to make stops at landmarks in Wisconsin’s history. Our state rock is red granite, which you can see a lot of in the Capitol building’s columns. That rock tells that we used to have volcanoes here 1.75 billion years ago, way before dinosaurs."

Also, long ago the Baraboo Hills by Devil’s Lake State Park may have been taller than the Himalayan Mountains, she said.

“We also find lots of rocks and fossils from southern Wisconsin that show us that we used to be covered by an ocean, from a time when the state was located south of the equator because of the moving tectonic plates. That would have made us a spring break destination with vast sandy beaches and interesting critters in the ocean to see.”

The final stop on her mini-tour deals with fossils like the mastodon, which dates to the most recent Ice Age that ended around 10,000 years ago in Wisconsin. 

Visitors to the museum can also learn about the state’s more modern geology, including the arrival of thousands of lead miners to southwest Wisconsin in the early 19th century. They were called badgers, then a pejorative term, because they sometimes lived in caves or the mines themselves.

There’s a window in the back corner of the facility where you can see students at work cleaning fossils that have been brought back to the museum by a staff researcher and his undergraduate helpers. 

“Part of our mission is to help unravel Earth’s mysteries, to better understand how it works and how it’s changed over time,” said Slaughter, the museum director. 

“That’s why we have a scientist who is actively involved in expeditions to Wyoming, collecting fossils in amphibian bone beds. It is a world-class site. Using data we pull out of there, we can better understand the dawn of dinosaurs.”

And those tons of fossils and rocks in the basement?

“When our scientists, and others from our department, collect evidence to support theories, they need a place to store it so that evidence can be rechecked in future.

“We have specimens that date to 1800s, when the first Wisconsin geologists were trying to understand mountain ranges that were once here. They are still available. Sometimes things that were once deemed unimportant can become very interesting because of later technological developments.”

More information: The museum is open 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday and 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. See geoscience.wisc.edu/museum.

Getting there: The UW-Madison Geology Museum, 1215 W. Dayton St., is 80 miles west of Milwaukee via I-94.