It looks like a random blotch on a piece of gray shale, maybe some kind of odd Rorschach test left by Mother Nature for us to contemplate. But it’s not: It’s the fossil of a tiny invertebrate animal with an exoskeleton, an arthropod, that lived some 500 million years ago.
Jerry Gunderson collected a lot of these.
Gunderson, a former middle school science teacher in Middleton, WI, spent more than 65 years collecting and cataloguing fossils from Wisconsin, the upper Midwest and western states like Colorado and Nevada. When he died last year at the age of 79, he donated the entirety of his massive collection, comprising thousands of fossils, to the UW-Madison Geology Museum, an organization he loved and supported for decades. It’s the largest donation of specimens the museum has ever received.
Standing in the basement of the Weeks Hall for Geological Sciences, Rich Slaughter, the director of the Geology Museum, holds up one of Gunderson’s fossil samples, now stored in locked collection drawers.
“Typically, when you're dealing with fossils, you're looking at bones and teeth and shells—it's the hard parts that survive,” he says. “It’s very rare to get soft-bodied organisms like insects. It's almost like getting a winning lottery ticket.”
Gunderson was involved in the discovery of at least two fossil motherlodes—paleontologists refer to them as “Lagerstätte”—in Waukesha and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Many of the fossils Gunderson collected were preserved in very fine shales and limestones, where a lack of oxygen and water currents prevented decomposition. Slaughter likens them to a sort of geological photograph; instead of the actual cricket or jellyfish, you’re left with a flattened carbon film of it. Some of these fossils are remarkably detailed, as if they’d been painted on the rocks by a skilled artist.
Gunderson would look for rocks that would be favorable to that kind of preservation and then split them, revealing the fossils trapped inside. Meticulously, he numbered every sample in his collection with detailed cards containing the genus and species as well as the longitude and latitude of the location where he found it. One of his oldest entries, a snail shell, dates to 1956, when Gunderson was a teenager growing up in Appleton.
“He was the consummate amateur paleontologist,” says Slaughter, pausing a moment to clarify his choice of words. “Oftentimes, ‘amateur’ is a word that’s used in a diminishing fashion—oh, they're just an amateur. But what amateur really means is someone who does it for love. You did not need to pay Jerry to collect fossils.”
Institutions across the country feature specimens collected by Gunderson, including the Denver Museum of Natural History, the Paleontological Research Institute in New York, Yale University and other schools and colleges. Gunderson even has a couple of ancient species named after him.
Gunderson’s donated fossils have already made a sizable impact beyond visitors to the Geology Museum, says Slaughter. Researchers from the University of California have borrowed fossils of arthropods from the Cambrian Period (around 500 million years ago), and several students have earned advanced degrees in recent years looking at Gunderson’s samples.
But the benefits go beyond research and education. Some of Gunderson’s vast collection, which, at the end of his life, had grown to occupy many of the rooms in his house, are pieces suitable for what Slaughter calls “giveaways” to, for instance, children who visit the museum to celebrate their birthdays. Those gifts, says Slaughter, can spark the same lifelong love of fossils that Gunderson had. That spirit of giving is as much in keeping with Gunderson’s lively personality as the bucket hats he always wore.
“He was like the Johnny Appleseed of fossils,” says Slaughter. “Even in retirement, he would have the joy of a child about fossils. When you’d show him a new discovery, he'd be like, ‘No way!’”
The full expanse of Gunderson’s collection will take years to fully unpack and absorb. Slaughter and his museum staff are looking forward to it. To demonstrate, Slaughter holds up a small plastic box containing a set of fossilized, triangular-shaped shark teeth barely larger than a tiny pebble.
“There's a poem about seeing the universe in a grain of sand,” says Slaughter. “At Jerry’s memorial service, I quipped that he would have been able to find a couple of fossils on that grain of sand.”