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This story appeared in the Fall 2019 Letters & Science magazine.

One of the Board of Regents’ first orders of business, after the university’s founding in 1848, was to call for a “cabinet of natural history” to collect and curate the state’s plants, animals and minerals. Today, in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, museums and special collections across the College of Letters & Science continue to maintain and showcase incredible resources.


Rocking On

Whether it's the sparkling gems, prehistoric fossils or looming mastodon skeleton, the exhibits at the Geology Museum regularly elicit oohs and ahhs from visitors.“Every day there’s an auditory reminder of the wonder we provide,” says assistant director and outreach specialist Brooke Norsted.

The museum, located in Weeks Hall, is open to the public Mondays through Saturdays and receives more than 50,000 visitors a year who come on their own or as part of a tour.

Vistiors can see — and even touch — a meteorite, and explore rocks and minerals, including some glowing in a blacklight-illuminated room. Additional highlights are the Earth’s oldest rock and Earth’s oldest fossil, 4 billion and 3.4 billion years old, respectively.

“We have many superlatives here,” says museum director Richard Slaughter.

But young visitors love the museum’s finale — a room filled with the skeletons of a mastodon and Edmontosaurus annectens, the first dinosaur put on display in Wisconsin.

The museum also uses its collection of more than 120,000 geological and paleontological specimens for education, research and, increasingly, outreach. Staff have offered creative programming throughout and beyond Wisconsin, at stock pavilions, minor league ballparks and holiday events.

“It’s nice to mix things up,” Slaughter says, “and find new ways to think about teaching the same trilobites.”


Science in Motion

When a radiometer, invented in 1873, is exposed to light, its rotor with four lightweight metal vanes rotates.

It's impossible not to tinker at the L.R. Ingersoll Physics Museum. Fortunately, that’s by design. The 70-plus objects displayed around the golden- walled room in Chamberlin Hall are made for hands-on experimenting.

Most people don’t even need to read the exhibits’ directions, says instructional program manager Steve Narf.

“It’s more about, ‘Let’s figure out how this works, and then why it works,’” he says.

When visitors spin a coin down the gravity well, play particle physics pinball or clank the balls of a Newton’s Cradle, they’re having fun, learning and discovering that physics doesn’t have to be intimidating.

“Physics is nothing scary,” Narf says. “It’s just a term. It’s the study of motion.”

Nearly 9,000 children come through the museum each year, and visitors can pop in during regular hours (8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays) or sign up in advance for a guided tour. Narf especially enjoys overhearing their comments.

“I hear kids say, ‘I like physics now.’”


Cultural Clues

The Anthropological Collections date back to 1929, when the Department of Anthropology was founded and faculty brought in items from the field. The collections have since grown to include pieces of prehistoric pottery, spear points, stone tools, skeletal remains and other items from Wisconsin and far beyond.

“Our collection is international,” says academic curator Elizabeth Leith,“because our faculty work all over the world.

Some of the collection’s artifacts go on display in cases on the fifth and sixth floors of the Sewell Social Sciences Building, but most are tidily tucked away in storage.”

A bronze figurine of a kneeling Krishna from the Anthropological Collections.

“We’re a museum, but we don’t have much exhibit space,” Leith explains. “Our collections have always been used for both research and education."

Of course, the collections are always growing as work continues in the field, and those finds naturally make their way into classrooms, labs and outreach events such as public lectures and school visits.

“The discipline has historically supported collecting,” Leith says, “and those collections help bolster our academic programs.”


Animal Kingdom

A mounted wolf from the Zoological Museum's mammals collection.

There are skeletons in Noland Hall’s closets. No, they’re not secrets about the Department of Integrative Biology, but rather, part of the 750,000 specimens that make up the Zoological Museum.

The museum maintains specimens of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and additional creatures, many of them from Wisconsin. Cabinets contain animal skeletons and skins, while shelves store jars filled with a fascinating variety of fish, snakes, lizards and crayfish. Several taxidermy animals, including a large polar bear on display in the lobby of Birge Hall, round out the collection.

A special emphasis is skeletons, with close to 20,000 specimens representing all vertebrate classes.

“There are so many things you can learn by looking at skeletons,” says curator of collections Laura Monahan.

Space for public programming is limited, so the museum primarily serves researchers and students fascinated with the animal world. And it continues to collect specimens—about 1,000 a year— as donations come in from researchers, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and zoos.

“We don’t ever know when it’s going to happen,” Monahan says of donations. “It makes every day different.”


Deep Roots

Rows upon of metal cabinets in Birge Hall contain the state’s history in plant form—through more than 1.3 million specimens.

Wild lupine (Lupinus perennis)

“Every one tells a story,” says Ken Cameron, director of the Wisconsin State Herbarium.

The herbarium’s collection includes hundreds of pressed and dried specimens of the same species, labeled with the date, location and other details that allow scientists to track a plant across time and space, and understand its natural variation.

“Every year that passes, these specimens become more valuable,” says Cameron, who also chairs the botany department. “They’re our window into the past. They’re a time machine.”

The collection started with a box of specimens that naturalist and scientist Increase A. Lapham donated to launch the herbarium in 1849. And scientists continue to collect samples of vascular plants, bryophytes, fungi, lichens and more, while staff and volunteers process the specimens to be stored in the herbarium and digitally catalogued. Nearly 300,000 have already been added to online databases, which are available to the public.

Additionally, students, researchers and nature enthusiasts can request access to the herbarium’s collection. Cameron initially worried that people would stop traveling from around the world to see the plant samples in person once they could view them online. But visits have actually increased.

“People learn what we have here and want to see it for themselves,” he says.

Did you know UW-Madison scientists made crucial contributions to the space exploration boom in the 1960s? And that the university continues to be a leader in astronomical research and innovation?


Star Treatment

Tarnished lenses of the Washburn Observatory telescope, before their historic cleaning in 2012.

“That’s where our footprint really is — science in space,” says James Lattis, director of Space Place, the education and public outreach center of the astronomy department. “Having artifacts right in front of visitors really brings that alive.”

Imaginations soar when visitors get up close to five complex instruments that flew in space, including the High-Speed Photometer, an original piece of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Space Place hosts roughly 10,000 visitors each year and holds a robust array of more than 100 public events, including viewings of the night sky on its rooftop Skydeck. Stargazing is also a specialty at the Washburn Observatory, which has been welcoming the public since 1881.

Today, astronomy graduate students offer free public observing on the first and third Wednesday of each month, weather permitting, using a historic Clark telescope.

“Most people have never seen a big, old-fashioned telescope like that,” Lattis says. “It was built in the days when astrono- mers really looked through telescopes and made observations by looking through the eyepiece.”

While the telescope is now considered obsolete for scientific purposes, Lattis says it’s still a thrill to use. “Suddenly you see spots on Jupiter or a double star you haven’t seen before.”


Collections Collaboration

The Board of Regents was certainly on to something 170 years ago when it envisioned a university-run collection of natural resources. Today, a group of scientists is working on a major technological update on the idea.

A UW2020-funded project will centralize the databases of the university’s five natural history units — the Wisconsin State Herbarium, the Geology Museum, the Zoological Museum and the Anthropological Collections, all in the College of Letters & Science, and the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection in the College of Agricultural & Life Sciences — to make more than 11 million specimens available to researchers and the public online.

“We’re bringing it from a 19th-century Victorian collection to a 21st-century collection in the digital age,” says Ken Cameron, director of the herbarium and project lead, adding that the goal is to have the “online data portal” up and running by 2020.