Geology museum opens doors to public with Rock and Fossil Day
The new geology museum on campus hosted Rock and Fossil Day Saturday which included a model of a river, a fossil dig, glowing rocks and dinosaur sugar cookies.
The museum, put together on a “shoestring” budget, is full of specimens USU has gathered over the last hundred years or so, but a few were recently donated by former students, according to Liddell. The museum has a lot of potential to upgrade and change over the years.
“If we had more room, we could double or triple the size of the museum,” said David Liddell, department head for the geology department.
On Rock and Fossil Day, the museum opened its displays to the public. In the activity room, kids dug for fossils, made their own out of clay and looked at thin slices of rocks under a microscope. The Geology Club had mineral kits for sale, a model river was running and there was a presentation on earthquakes downstairs. Upstairs, members of the geology department helped identify rocks brought in by people from the community.
Payton Rabey, who attended the event with his friends Atticus and Jacob Feldon, said his favorite part of the museum was seeing all the shiny rocks. Atticus enjoyed experimenting with the rocks, bones and dried lava they brought in.
“My favorite part was getting the stuff in our backyard analyzed,” Jacob Feldon said.
A curator and undergraduate in geology, Michael Strange was involved with every aspect of the museum. He went through the geology collections to find specimens and researched the items to create the displays and posters in the museum. When the museum project began moving forward, Strange was already working for the department as a technician, according to Liddell.
“He’s gone way beyond what you expect an undergraduate technician to do,” Liddell said.
Strange said he’s always wanted to work in a museum, but never expected to be able to this soon. His favorite part of this project was going through the collections, some of which haven’t been touched for 30 or 40 years.
“We had drawers and drawers of stuff that could hold anything,” he said. “Opening a new drawer was just so much fun because you don’t know what could be in there.”
The Geology building used to have displays set up around the hallways with minerals and fossils, but now the specimens have a new home in room 203. The museum was first suggested after someone broke into the geology building and stole some valuable meteorites, minerals and a mammoth tooth.
“After it happened, it kind of seemed obvious that it was going to,” Strange said.
The individual was caught by the USU Police Department and all of the stolen specimens were recovered.
“It actually was a good thing because it gave us the incentive to start looking for a place to have a museum,” said David Liddell, head of the geology department. “That made us think that we can’t just leave things out in the hallways because some crystals are worth several hundred dollars a piece, meteorites in particular, and we realized we had to do something.”
Some of the items like the meteorites from Mars and the moon are worth more than gold, Liddell said.
People will miss seeing the specimens as they walk to class, Strange said.
“I think we should have had a museum like this from the beginning,” he said. “But it was really fun to have specimens just sitting out in the hallways for everyone to see.”
Now it’s more structured and the specimens are better-protected, Strange said. The museum has alarmed doors and four cameras that can see every angle of the room, according to Liddell.