cc  >> Cassie Immel: Welcome  to Wednesday Nite at the Lab,  here at the Biotechnology Center  tonight.  Tonight, we will welcome Brook  Norsted.  She's the Assistant Director of  the UW Geology Museum.  She spends her days talking to  kids about dinosaurs and rocks.  She coordinates science outreach  events on and off campus.  It's a pretty fun job.  And she earned her bachelor's in  geology at Gustavus Adolphus,  and her master's in geology here  at UW-Madison.  She has a keen interest in  taking science outreach to  non-traditional venues, as well  as a commitment to introducing  young women to science careers.  She's a coordinator of the  outreach efforts tied to the  NASA Astrobiology Institute  grant, and is on the planning  committee for the annual Darwin  Day festivities here on the UW  campus.  She's also a co-chair for  Expanding Your Horizons. 

 So please join me in welcoming  Brooke Norsted to Wednesday Nite  at the Lab.  (applause)  >> Brooke Norsted: Hi, there.  Thanks so much for having me  tonight.  Out of curiosity, who's been to  the Geology Museum?  I see a few familiar faces.  Excellent.  Good.  Well, for those of you who  haven't been there, for shame.  I brought brochures.  And I'm sure you'll be very  compelled by the end of my talk  to come visit all of our  interesting exhibits.  I'm a fairly informal speaker,  so if you have burning questions  that come up while I'm talking,  feel free to just raise your  hand, or jump in. 

 Okay, thank you.  So, to start, this past year,  the Geology Museum celebrated  its 160th birthday.  So, I want to tell you about its  long and fairly rocky, pardon  the pun, history here on campus.  So, 160 years ago, 1848, the  museum was founded, effectively,  with the beginning of the UW.  It was at the first Board of  Regents meeting that they  decided that part of this new  institution should include a  mineral cabinet.  So, H.A. Tenney took it upon  himself to write a letter,  and to send it out to everybody  he knew in the state.  And this letter, as you can see  here, is pretty thorough, what  he was looking for.  And he implored his friends to  send him interesting mineral and  rock specimens from the state,  because they really wanted to  build up this case to showcase  what Wisconsin had to offer.  I just want to quote a little  bit of it.  This is the last few sentences. 

 He says, "In conclusion, I would  earnestly urge upon all who may  receive this circular to  contribute specimens and solicit  their friends and neighbors  to do likewise.  Every neighborhood can do  something.  Will you then try, sir?"  The mineral cabinet was first  housed in Bascom Hall.  Then it moved to South Hall.  And then, it reached its fairly  permanent home, for a while, in  Science Hall in 1877.  The cabinet grew pretty quickly.  I think Tenney was a bit  surprised by the reception that  he got from this letter.  And he actually ended up funding  a lot of this out of his own  pocket, you know, trying to get  specimens there, building this  case.  And in 1856, the Regents called  the geology cabinet  the best in the west.  So here is old Science Hall. 

 The museum lived here from 1877  until December 1, 1884, when a  fire broke out and destroyed the  building.  Students saw the flames and  called the fire department.  The fire department thought it  was a prank, so they didn't  respond.  Students tried to put out the  fire themselves.  They tried to get into the  hoses, but the doors were  locked, because it was expensive  equipment, and the fire  department didn't want students  tampering with it.  Then, even when the fire  department did show up, the  hoses they had brought, they  couldn't hook them up to the  hydrants.  It was a huge problem.  And they were lambasted, the  fire department was lambasted in  the papers and editorials for  what a poor job they did  responding to this fire.  At this point, Science Hall was  one of only a handful of  buildings on campus.  And the destruction of it, you  know, nearly closed down the  university. 

 This was the building that was  housing all of the science  departments, except for  pharmacology, I think.  And besides the academic  departments that were housed  there, the other things that  were destroyed were the Latham  Library, the UW Art Collections,  the Geology Cabinet, of course,  and the bones of General  Sherman's horse, which were also  part of the collection at the  time.  So, those were all destroyed in  the fire.  So, learning their lesson from  the fire at Science Hall, they  built a new building.  They raised a lot of funds from  the legislature to build a new  building.  And they made it as fire proof  as they could.  It's considered the first fire  proof building.  They used tile, brick, steel  I-beams.  They didn't want wood anywhere.  They didn't want this thing  catching on fire again. 

 And it was actually one of the  first buildings in the world to  use steel I-beam construction.  And since this was a new  technology, I'm assuming,  they didn't have the ability  to really cut these I-beams  to size on site.  So, as they built their way up,  and you can see here, where  this tower in the middle is,  they needed some shorter  I-beams, but they had no good  way of making shorter I-beams.  So their way of getting around  this problem was to take a drill  and drill through the I-beam  repeatedly, and then bend it  back and forth to snap it.  And so, apparently even today,  if you climb up into the attic  of Science Hall, you can see  these serrated edges of the  steel I-beams from this  technique they used to break off  the I-beams.  And also, they got a little lazy  at some point, and they decided  to just not cut off some of the  I-beams.  I learned of this a few days ago  and then I looked at this  picture.  I think you can actually see  three of these I-beams sticking  out of the side of Science Hall  right there.  And it wasn't until a renovation  some time in the last 30 years  that they cut those off.  An author, James Pyre, wrote a  book, "Wisconsin," and in that  book he described Science Hall  as the "...largest, most useful,  most expensive and easily the  ugliest building the university  had yet acquired. 

 Science Hall will doubtless  stand indefinitely a monument to  the prosperity, progressiveness,  bad taste and good intentions  of the latter '80s."  So, everybody has got their own  opinions about Science Hall.  The former director of the  museum is absolutely in love  with Science Hall.  He's quite the historian and  loves to tell stories about when  the museum was in Science Hall.  Frank Lloyd Wright was actually  an assistant on this project,  in the construction of Science  Hall.  And the former director of the  museum, Klaus Westphal, has a  theory that Wright's later  architecture was in direct  response to this.  (laugher)  He wanted nothing to do with  this style.  The building has a lot of  quirks, a lot of which have been  removed at this point.  But there was, again, in the  interest of fire safety, they  had a fire escape on the back  corner of the building, the back  southwest corner of the  building.  And instead of a stairwell,  it was actually a slide that  corkscrewed down the entire side  of the building.  It was inside its own turret. 

 And you can imagine, being on a  college campus, that people  would have more creative uses  for a slide that goes down four  stories.  So, Klaus, the former director,  his office was right in the  corner where this slide was.  And every floor had its own  access point to get into this  slide.  So, he had a door in his office  that went into the wall, where  you could jump right in and  slide down the slide.  Then you'd pop out at the ground  out on the lawn.  So, he, having an office there,  he would routinely hear people,  you know, cackling their way  down this slide.  And it got really annoying.  So he said, and I quote,  "I had a sink and a bucket,  and I knew how to use it."  He would open that chute up and  dump water down after students  who were, you know, riding down  the slide.  It got to a point where he would  even grease the slide, because  people were trying to climb up  it.  So, he was on the second floor,  and he would put Vaseline down  to make it so they couldn't  climb up past his office. 

 But he didn't have all bad  feelings about the slide.  He actually had used it once,  just to try it out.  Also, there was a cage elevator  that was in Science Hall that  was removed in the 1970s.  But there was a big push of  staff that were in the building  to not get rid of this wonderful  elevator.  They all took a last ride in it  when it was removed.  Since Science Hall housed all of  the science departments, it also  housed the Medical School for a  long time.  And dissections were done on the  fourth floor.  So, in the back of the building,  also, you would have horses that  would pull up and unload  cadavers.  Then there was another winch  system on the back of the  building that was enclosed.  So, students on the fourth floor  would have to winch these  cadavers all the way up to the  labs where they would do  dissections. 

 And there's rumors of Science  Hall being haunted, because of  all of this.  And also, people have climbed up  into the attic and found various  shriveled up body parts, in the  past, that have been planted  there by former students.  Another kind of sordid tale from  Science Hall.  But the Geology Museum, back to  my topic, was housed on the  second floor.  It was pretty much where my  cursor is.  It was taking up the south wing  of Science Hall.  Originally, the Geology Museum  occupied about 5,000 square  feet, so it had a generous  amount of space in Science Hall.  And by the early 1900s, the  museum's collection had four  major focuses.  There was paleontology, all the  fossils.  There were minerals and rocks. 

 Economic geology, so people  interested in ore.  And then, also there were tens  of thousands of specimens that  were part of the United States  Geological Survey and the  Wisconsin Survey.  So, the museum was a repository  for all of those specimens as  well.  But the museum, at this point,  was suffering from competition  for space in Science Hall.  And so, it started shrinking.  Classrooms were added into the  museum area, so the museum had  to pack up some of its stuff and  put it in storage.  And a lot of this stuff was  packed away for 20 years.  You'll find that this is a  repeated trend, this shrinking  and swelling of the Geology  Museum and its collections.  And it seems like every time it  gets packed up and some of the  material gets put in storage,  items are lost.  So, I'm going to point out a few  pictures here where we see  specimens that are gone. 

 Yeah?  (inaudible)  Yes, this right here, this guy  with this big shell, you're  seeing his backside, is  an ice age armadillo relative.  It called a glyptodon.  And this is actually one that's  still in the Geology Museum  today.  And it's one of the only  specimens you can touch in the  vertebrate room.  So, you can go there and give  the glyptodon a pet.  You can see its big, spiky  tail.  It has a large shell.  And unlike armadillos today,  that can curl up in a defensive  posture, these ones weren't able  to do that.  They were more like a tank.  They could, you know, just  hunker down if they were under  attack. 

 They didn't live here in  Wisconsin during the ice age.  They lived in warmer climates.  They lived down in Florida and  South America.  Other things you can see in this  picture, if you move forward  from the glyptodon, you can see  the back side of a skull that  has two big tusks coming off of  it.  That is a mammoth skull.  It's a cast.  And behind that one, or I guess  in front of that one, there's  this big kind of hulking figure,  with its arm raised.  We're going to move to the next  picture and we can see it.  Now we've turned around and  we're looking the other  direction.  That big guy with his hand up,  giving you a high five, that is  a giant sloth. 

 These are animals that lived  during the ice age.  They were ground sloths.  They didn't live in trees.  They lived on the ground and  they would pull down branches  and strip them of their  vegetation.  So if you've seen Ice Age the  movie, there's a sloth in the  movie.  They didn't just make that up.  Sloths were around during the  ice age.  But they were a lot bigger than  Sid is in that movie.  Here, you can see, also, in  front of the sloth, there's  another mammoth skull, another  cast.  Both of those mammoth skulls and  the giant sloth skull are  missing. 

 They've been missing for a long  time.  And so, it's during one of these  shrink-swell cycles where things  got packed away, that specimens  disappeared.  So it's unknown if it happened  in transit, who stole these  things.  But they're not in the museum's  collection anymore.  You can see the style of  cabinetry here, too.  You'll see that evolve through  these slides I'm showing you.  Here you have kind of a  conventional rectangular cabinet  with a glass top, so you need  to lean over into it.  It's not really accessible to  children so much, because you  need to be tall enough to look  in the top.  Let's keep up with my notes  here.  In 1909, CK Leath commissioned a  man named EHJ Lorenz to make  some relief maps. 

 He thought that this would  bolster the collection of the  museum.  And some of these relief maps  still hang in Science Hall  today.  There are some in the Geology  Museum as well.  So, if you've ever been in  Science Hall, and you've seen,  there's one, I believe, of the  Mendenhall Glacier.  There's one in the museum of the  Baraboo range.  Those were made in 1909.  This was a man who worked in the  Engineering College.  He was hired, he was pulled away  by Leath to make these relief  models.  Then he caught on that this was  a good idea.  And in 1910, he formed his own  business and decided to do that  full-time. 

 The next person who was in  charge of the museum, his name  was FT Thwaites.  He struggled.  He didn't really like being the  curator of the museum, mostly  because it was underfunded.  There was a constant struggle in  the department as to what the  role of the museum was.  Was it meant to be a showcase  for the public to come and see?  Was it meant to just house a  teaching collection and be used  by students and researchers?  Was it just meant to be a  repository, and shouldn't even  have a display space?  And this is something that the  faculty were fighting about, and  Thwaites felt like he was in the  middle of, and didn't enjoy his  time as curator.  But in his tenure, one of the  most iconic specimens that we  have, still in the museum today,  came in.  So this here is the Boaz  Mastodon.  And it was excavated near Boaz,  Wisconsin, which is out by  Richland Center.  This is a creature that walked  around Wisconsin  during the ice age.  Now, a common question is,  what's the difference between a  mammoth and a mastodon. 

 And again, I'll harken back to  the Ice Age the movie.  That's a mammoth.  On the outside, they both looked  like big, hairy elephants.  But one of the critical  differences are their teeth.  In the mouth of a mastodon, are  12 teeth, each one, you know,  like the size of a big, human  fist.  They have these big ridges on  them.  And these animals would live in  forests and eat things like  twigs and tree branches.  The mammoths have big teeth.  They have teeth that are the  size of tennis shoes.  And they only have four in their  mouth. 

 Their teeth are fairly flat on  top.  They would eat grass.  So, these are two large  herbivores that lived at the  same time, but didn't have to  directly compete for food,  because they were looking for  different kinds of plants.  And when you come to the museum,  we have just the mastodon as a  skeleton on display of these  two, but there is a case where  you can actually compare the  teeth, and see the size  difference.  You'll see the difference of the  texture of their teeth.  So when this was discovered,  this was discovered not by  scientists, and not by adults,  even.  It was found by four kids on  their farm.  They were just farm boys  out, apparently poking around  after a big storm.  And they found these strange  things sticking out of the side  of a creek bank on their  property.  They started digging away. 

 They got their friends and  family to help, and they found  half of this skeleton.  And so, as you're looking at it,  the right side, as we're looking  straight on, the right side is  real, the left side is replica.  The lower jaw is real, but the  rest of the skull and the tusks  are not.  Those are replica.  So, the legislature bought this  specimen, acquired this  specimen, and then it came to  the museum that way.  So, it's been on display in the  museum since 1915.  So, if you come back, keep your  eyes open, in 2015, I'm going to  be having a birthday party for  the mastodon.  You're all invited.  (light laughter)  So, Thwaites, the one who didn't  really like being curator, he  became a full-time professor in  1928 and left the museum  business.  Next up, was Gilbert Raasch. 

 He was hired as the curator in  1929.  He had been a geology student at  the UW.  He had also worked at the  Milwaukee Public Museum, so he  had a museum background.  And he was the museum's first  full-time curator.  So, everybody up until this  point had kind of been doing a  patchwork job.  Their job was to teach, as well  as to manage this collection.  So, this is the first person who  could really focus.  He remarked that the museum's  past without a curator had been,  well, he said,  "Without a curator who could  devote his undivided attention  to the museum, it became  a sort of Cinderella,  whose career was sacrificed  for the agradisement  of her more aggressive sisters."  So he's talking about, you know,  this shrinking that had to  happen to the museum over and  over again, because all these  other departments would start  carving away space from the  museum's display area.  And the museum actually  recovered all of that previously  gobbled up space when the  Medical School moved out in  1928.  So, suddenly, it was like a big  fresh breath of air. 

 The museum could then, again,  expand back out to 5,000 square  feet and bring everything back  from storage.  This, of course, is when a lot  of things were noticed that they  were missing.  Raasch was given a $30,000  budget.  But the stipulation on this was  that he had to spend every  single penny.  So, he sat down and he crafted a  budget.  He got up to $25,000 and he just  couldn't think of how to spend  that extra $5,000.  So, he didn't get any money.  Then, you know, this is during  the depression.  And so, there wasn't really that  much money to spend on  specimens.  He confessed to this in the  Geology Department newsletter,  after he was done being curator. 

 He said he felt horrible that he  wasn't able to spend all this   money.  But what he did in place of  that, and in place of being able  to acquire new big specimens,  was he enlisted the help of  another staff person in the  department who is a person who  cuts thin sections.  Thin sections are this thin  little slices of rock that they  mount to glass slides, so you  can see through them and study  the architecture of the rock.  So, this guy cuts thin sections,  but he's also an artist.  So, Raasch thinks, ah-ha, I'm  going to have this person create  some work to put into the  museum.  So, this is also stuff that you  can still see in the museum.  Fred Wilhelm is the thin section  artist.  And this is actually, I took  this picture today.  This is a 3-D painting of  dimetrodons.  Another thing that he had Fred  Wilhelm do, and I apologize,  this isn't a great photo, but he  had him make some dioramas. 

 This is kind of a new thing.  The Milwaukee Public Museum is  actually the first museum to  really use and make dioramas,  where you could kind of see the  environment in which these  animals were living, instead of  just seeing a stuffed animal,  you would see a stuffed animal  within its living environment.  So, I suspect that Raasch  adopted that idea.  So he had Fred Wilhelm make a  four-part series of the history  of Devil's Lake.  And so, each little time slice  was talking about the evolution  during the ice age, effectively,  of the creation of Devil's Lake.  Then, also, Wilhelm was a busy  guy.  He also created a working model  of a volcano that occasionally  erupted.  That's something I've never  found a picture of, but it seems  like something that would be  popular in the museum today.  You just need a "go" button.  All right, well, this harkens  back to my talk title. 

 Raasch left and went to  Oklahoma, and turned out to have  a really successful career in  paleontology.  When he left in 1939, the  department hired a woman named  Marvelle Ings to be the next  curator.  This was controversial.  She was one of only, at that  time, three female curators in  the world.  So, this is actually a news  clipping that I grabbed,  which I absolutely love,  so I'm going to read it to you.  So what was she doing that was  so crazy?  Well, here she is.  Her history is that she actually  graduated from the UW Journalism  Department, so she did not have  a geology background, really.  She had taken some geology  classes.  She was very interested in it  and she jumped at the chance to  be the curator.  But she considered herself to  really be a geology publicist. 

 So, she used her background in  journalism to really bump up the  activity and the presence of the  Geology Museum.  She said, "I moved out half the  exhibits, cleaned up the rest,  modernized the labels so they  didn't read like a Latin  dictionary, made the displays  tell stories, invited public  school teachers to bring their  classes, gave lectures before  various state organizations,  and wrote and wrote."  She wrote lots of press  releases.  And our museum archives, as soon  as she comes on the scene,  there's this flood of newspaper  articles about the Geology  Museum.  She really wanted to have new  exhibits all the time, bring in  people.  You know, it may seem weird for  a museum, for it to seem  controversial that a museum was  showing school children around,  but it was at this time, that  you were inviting these kids  into the museum all the time.  Another thing she did, she  hosted Saturday Story Hours.  And she thought of this idea,  and she realized there weren't  any kids books written about  the stuff she wanted to read.  So, she had to make her own  books.  So, this is actually a book  we still have that she made.  I think it's an old Golden Guide  Book, and she painted new  pictures and pasted over  all the pages. 

 So the book is called  "Ramforinkus."  These story times were very  popular.  They would have more than  100 kids in attendance.  Here's a page from it.  This is about a Pterosaur,  a flying reptile, learning  how to fly.  And it says, "And Ramforinkus  from Bronty's head tickled his  nose with his claws and said,  'If you fellows can fly,  then so can I.'"  And they're all just hand-drawn  illustration in these books.  She also composed plays  that she distributed through  the schools in Wisconsin.  And she populated these plays  with such characters as  Johnny Mammal  and Timmy Titanothere.  These apparently were really  popular, too.  Kids could perform in the roles  and also be learning about the  geology at the same time.  Her techniques were  unconventional, but really  successful. 

 She put up exhibits in  storefront windows in town.  She made a concerted effort to  reinforce the message that  geology is close to the life of  every person.  And especially during the war,  she was doing this by, a lot of  her traveling exhibits were  focusing on minerals and their  importance in the war effort.  So a lot of these press releases  that our archives are filled  with are talking about these  exhibits that she was putting  together, and putting wherever  she could find space.  So, it wasn't just the museum  anymore.  She was going outside into the  community, trying to get more  people interested and aware.  In 1943, she moved to the  Wisconsin Historical Society.  And with her departure from the  Museum, she was named one of  Mademoiselle Magazine's Women of  the Year, for her role as female  curator, "girl curator," I  suppose is what they call them.  (laughter)  So, with her departure, suddenly  the museum was back in part-time  curator status.  They didn't have a full-time  person. 

 So, there were a number of  students who were trying to  cobble together all the  responsibilities for the museum.  And space in Science Hall,  again, started to become  cramped.  During the war, suddenly there  was more classrooms were being  built, so they again shrunk the  museum down as you can see here.  After the war, enrollments were  really high.  So again, they were just  shrinking the museum.  The museum actually shrunk down,  and lost 75% of its space.  And many exhibits were put in  storage again.  The Lorenz relief models that  were built were moved out of the  museum and put in the hallways.  That's why they're in the  hallways today.  Those Devil's Lake dioramas were  packed up and moved out. 

 And at some point, made their  way to the Devil's Lake State  Park Visitor Center, which is  where you can see them today.  And again, things were packed  up, stored away.  And at some point in that  process, items were lost.  This is another point in our  history where we lose specimens.  After her tenure in 1945, the  University Museum Committee  tried to shut the museum down.  This was opposed really strongly  by the faculty in the  department.  And the museum stayed open.  But then there was this extra  pressure on the curators, these  part-time curators to not only  take care of the museum and its  curatorial needs, but also keep  it in the public eye, so that it  could justified why this museum  is still here.  So in 1948, the curator job  moved away from students to a  part-time curator, again, but a  professor named Lowell Lauden.  And over the next 20 years, he  was a part-time curator and he  employed lots of students to  help in the museum. 

 And he had them doing a lot of  the basic collections work, but  also really trying to keep that  level of public involvement and  participation in the museum  high, so the museum would remain  an entity on campus.  Unfortunately, one of these  students, in 1966, took  advantage of his trust, and  stole 96 crates of material from  the museum, 96 crates.  And it was valued at about  $100,000.  They knew things had been  stolen, but they didn't know who  had done it.  It wasn't until some of these  specimens started popping up at  rock shops in Chicago that they  were able to track it down.  Actually, Lowell Lauden had an  acquaintance who purchased a  specimen and called Lowell up  saying, hey, I want you to take  a look at this.  And Lowell saw it and said,  that's mine.  And so, at that point, they were  able to trace it back.  But this student apparently got  hired by an oil company in  Texas, and the oil company  offered to move him there.  So, he just claimed that these  96 crates were his personal  property. 

 So they shipped them down there  for him.  But apparently most of that  material was recovered and is  back in the museum's possession.  But you can see here, these are  the fairly cramped quarters that  the museum was in.  So at this point, it was down to  about 1,300 square feet, pretty  much, the Klaus called it a  slalom course.  And he'd set it up so at least  it had this illusion of being  larger than it was.  But it effectively was a  hallway.  (inaudible)  You know, I saw a warrant, I saw  a listing that there was a  warrant, but I don't know what  kind of punishment was eeked out  on him.  It's something that we've been  trying to figure out for few  years.  We've been trying to talk to  people who knew.  And nobody seems to have the  same story. 

 So we don't know.  (inaudible)  So, in 1968, we have a full-time  curator again.  This is when Klaus Westphal  comes on the scene.  You can see him here,  overlooking a case.  And he was fresh from Germany.  We hired him from Germany,  brought him over.  And immediately, he had a vision  for the museum.  >> When was that taken?  >> Norsted: I think this was  right about when he started.  This was probably in the early  '70s.  And so, one thing he wanted to  do was get new cases. 

 I pointed out earlier that the  cases were rectangular and you  had to kind of stoop to look  over into them.  He wanted something that had a  slanted back, something that you  could look into more easily,  something lit from the inside.  So you can see one of these  cases here.  He's lifted up the top, so that  they could get into the  specimens.  And also, on the horizon was a  move.  The museum was going to be  moving out of Science Hall and  into Weeks Hall.  The geology department had moved  and built this new building,  Weeks Hall, which is just a few  blocks from here, but they  hadn't had money at that point  to bring the museum with.  So, it wasn't until an addition  was built onto the back of the  building, where a new lecture  hall was built, actually called  the Lauden Lecture Hall, and the  museum was added on, too.  And so, Klaus knew this was on  the horizon.  Even in ordering these cases and  designing them, he was thinking  about moving them, and how they  were going to fit into this new  space. 

 So here, the mastodon is being  transplanted.  You can see all the scaffolding  built up around it.  This is in Weeks Hall, where  it's getting moved to.  You can see some students on the  right are moving the lower jaws  into place.  Again, we have a swelling back  up.  We went from 1,300 square feet.  Now we're at 3,600 square feet.  With this move, suddenly, he's  got a lot more space.  Klaus is trying to fill the  cases.  But he's an invertebrate  paleontologist by training, so  he's interested in animals that  don't have backbones. 

 So, his particular interests are  brachiopods, but he understands  that the public likes  vertebrates.  They like dinosaurs.  They like mammals.  And so, he wants to get some of  this to put into his new museum.  He's got all this space and he  wants to fill it up.  So a vertebrate field program is  started, with trips to the  Badlands of South Dakota, the  Chalk Beds of Kansas, and also  the dino-rich layers out in  South Dakota.  And so here you can see, this is  a crew from the museum, out  working in the field.  It's the kind of work that looks  really great in movies, but it's  not quite as romantic when  you're out there.  But you can see they're all  hunkered down working away.  And typically, what you do when  you find a specimen poking out  of a little hill slope, you  know, the first thing you want  to do is make sure that it keeps  going back into the rock. 

 Then you start clearing off  layers and working your way  back.  So, you can see that's what  they're doing.  They're all kind of working  back.  So here is one of the prizes  that they got from Kansas.  This is a skeleton of something  called a mososaur.  It's a swimming reptile that  lived during the age of  dinosaurs.  This was recovered from Kansas.  Kansas, you might be thinking,  is not a place for swimming  reptiles.  But when the dinosaurs were  around, for a long period of  time, there was a shallow ocean  that stretched out through the  middle of North America.  And so, if you were a dinosaur  living in Wisconsin, you  couldn't walk to Colorado,  because there was a shallow  ocean in the way. 

 So, swimming in that ocean were  critters like this.  This is one of my favorite  specimens in the museum, so I'm  going to wax on about it for  just a little bit.  This is 90% complete, so this is  very complete.  It's the most complete  vertebrate skeleton we have in  the museum.  It's just the end of the tail  that's missing, so that's a  replica in the specimen that you  see.  So, when they found it, again,  they found some of the tail  parts poking out of the hill  slope.  They started digging their way  back.  They found the back legs.  They found more backbone pieces.  They found ribs. 

 They found front legs.  They're getting really excited  at this point.  They make it all the way up to  the top of the neck, and there's  no head attached, which was kind  of a bummer for them.  And then they look carefully at  those last bones in the neck,  and there's actually sharp tooth  marks that are visible.  So, it's unknown whether or not    a shark bit this animal's head  off or scavenged it after it was  dead, but it's one of those  clues.  Not only can you learn about a  type of animal, but this  particular animal, you can learn  a story about it.  This specimen also has some  broken ribs.  You can't really see them in  this picture, but when you're  standing where these people are,  and you look straight up,  there's three ribs that have  these extra lumps in them.  That's evidence that the bones  were broken, but then healed.  Those thick parts are where they  reinforced themselves. 

 Then also, most interestingly,  the back flippers, if you  compare the two back flippers,  the palms of them, one of them  has three little bones in there  that look kind of like Mickey  Mouse.  And then if you look in the same  spot on the other flipper, those  three bones are gone, and  there's just one bigger bone.  That's evidence that this animal  had arthritis.  So, as kids on tour say, my  grandma has arthritis.  So, I say, what does that tell  us about this specimen?  So again, you can learn about  these groups of animals by  studying their skeletons, but  also particular individuals, and  kind of their life history, by  examining the pathology of the  specimen.  So this was, at this point, it's  Klaus working full-time, but  he's relying heavily on students  to run these field programs and  whatnot.  Yeah?  (inaudible)  It depends.  Typically, most recently, we've  been digging on federal  property.  And so, we get a permit to dig  on like Bureau of Land  Management land.  When it comes to private land,  typically, you do have an  agreement with a landowner. 

 And oftentimes, landowners are  sympathetic to museums, and  understand that they don't  really have a lot of money.  So, it's a different story  entirely when it's a private  collector or somebody who's  going to be selling those  specimens.  Then they have to work out some  kind of deal as to how they're  going to split the profit of it.  Yeah?  (inaudible)  Oh, yeah, the head was found   attached to a different skeleton  a few miles away.  And so, what we call that kind  of skeleton is a composite.  So, effectively, what we've done  is we've taken the body of one  and we've attached a head from  another individual.  So, as he's building up  collections from South Dakota  and Kansas, Klaus has his eyes  set on dinosaurs.  So, here you can see him  surrounded by what we call field  jackets.  These are plaster coatings that  we put onto specimens when dig  them up.  That's purely to protect them on  the trip back to Wisconsin. 

 You know, these bones are pretty  hardy.  They've been in the ground for  millions of years.  But sometimes a van trip for a  few thousand miles can bust them  up.  So we try to protect them as  much as possible.  Here you can see a couple of  students working on one of these  leg bones.  What they're effectively trying  to do is reinforce the center of  it so they're going to be able  to put it on display without it  falling apart.  By going out and looking for  dinosaurs, Klaus inadvertently  started a race in Wisconsin  between the UW Geology Museum  and the Milwaukee Public Museum.  At this point, there were no  dinosaurs mounted in Wisconsin.  And so, he didn't know it at the  time, but it turned into this  big publicity stunt, this race  of these two museums.  Because at the same time, they  were trying to mount a dinosaur. 

 So, here you can see, these are  students working on it.  Here, Klaus is overlooking  students assembling the  vertebral column.  They're stringing them up, like  popcorn on a string, onto a  steel pipe.  And here, you can see the  specimen is actually assembled  during open hours.  Visitors came in and were  checking in on progress, as you  can see here.  And at this point, the  anatosaurus, this is a  duckbilled dinosaur, is pretty  much complete.  If you look carefully, you'll  notice that he's missing his  hands.  But everything else is there.  But if you've been to the  Geology Museum, you know that  this dinosaur is not just  standing on the carpet.  It's actually up on a pedestal. 

 In this next picture, you'll get  to see the completed product.  And we did beat the Milwaukee  Public Museum.  So this is the first dinosaur  mounted in Wisconsin.  And so, here again, now you're  kind of overlooking the entire  vertebrate room.  You can see the anatosaurus  standing there.  This is also a composite  skeleton.  So the place that this skeleton  was found was in a bone bed.  This is a place where probably  hundreds of this kind of animal  died, likely trying to cross a  river.  You know, you hear about  wildebeest or caribou, when they  cross a river, many of them  drown and float downstream.  So, the bones in here are not  from one individual. 

 They're from many that get  combined together.  So again, on tours, kids like to  think of this being a he-she,  because it's a combination of  skeletons.  Inevitably, there are female and  male bones in there.  Another thing that Klaus  installed was a rotating October  exhibit.  So this is an example of one of  the October visits.  I think this is from 2002 or  2003.  These are all really interesting  clay concretions that form near  Lake Superior.  I actually brought some along,  so you can come and check them  out, and touch a few after my  talk.  But we are now an educational  tour de force, I like to say.  We give guided one-hour-long  tours to over 14,000 school  children every year. 

 And these tours are mostly led  by undergraduate students here  at the UW.  We have a big focus on  undergraduate education in the  museum.  So we involve them in doing  outreach, like tours or going to  schools, giving talks on campus.  We also have them working in the  prep lab.  This is where we clean off all  of the dinosaur skeletons.  Here you can see, this is a  triceratops that they're  reconstructing.  So they so independent directed  studies that are mentored by the  current director of the museum.  And then, also, we like to take  them on field trips.  So, here we are, this is this  past spring, actually, in a  place called Lost River Cave,  which is out near Mt. Horeb.  It's a former commercial cave,  but now it's been closed off to  the public. 

 But we went down for a morning  and wandered around, looking for  vertebrate specimens.  And then, another emphasis, and  this is something that I am  particularly interested in, is  unconventional, nontraditional  audience outreach.  So, a few years ago, I believe  in 2005, we hosted something  called the Rock Concert.  And we wanted it to be a pun for  sure.  This was in correlation with  some research that was being  done in the Geology Department.  One professor worked on  the oldest terrestrial object.  This is a zircon crystal that  was found in Australia that  dates to 4.04 billion years.  So, in honor of this old object,  and this idea of geologic time,  and how hard it is to wrap your  head around this concept of  billions of years, we  commissioned a jazz group out of  New York City to create a piece  of work.  So, the group is the Jazz  Passengers, and they created the  Rock Concert.  So they came and performed in  Memorial Union. 

 And we also had a one day only  showing of this zircon crystal,  because it actually had to go  back to Australia.  But it's so small that you  actually have to look through a  microscope to see it.  So people were showing up  expecting to see something big  and sparkly, and it's tiny.  And it was under police guard as  well, yes.  And also in that vein, this past  spring we hosted an astrobiology  night at the Mallard's Ballpark.  We are the outreach arm of a  NASA grant.  There are researchers in our  department who have money from  NASA to look for life in  outer space.  And you might be thinking,  geologists are looking for life  in outer space?  How'd you swing that one?  Well, they are looking for what  are called biosignatures.  This is not green guys with big  googly eyes, but rather  bacteria, microbes, evidence of  those things.  So not even the microbes  themselves, but evidence that  they have chemically manipulated  mineral surfaces, or they have  left behind unique minerals that  only form in organic conditions. 

 And so, in light of that, we are  trying to take this sort of  outreach to places that you  typically don't see science  outreach.  You know, one option is for us  to host an event and publicize  it.  Then we'll probably get people  who are already interested in  space, or looking for  extraterrestrial life, or rocks.  But here, we're going to an  event where there's already a  bunch of people, and they may  not care a lick about space or  NASA, or they might think that  NASA is wasting their money.  So by this, we're set up right  inside the gates, and we had  lots of fun, interactive  exhibits for people to see.  We also had trading cards that  we're giving out at the  gate.  Each one focuses on a different  type of extremophile.  These are bacteria that live in  highly acidic, or hot, or cold,  or radioactive conditions.  So, this is the sort of  direction we're taking.  I'd like to think we're  continuing in Miss Ings' legacy  of you know, we're not filling  storefronts, but that's a good  idea. 

 But rather, we're taking it to  new places.  And so, with that, I'd invite  you all, again, to come to the  museum.  We are free.  We are open Monday through  Friday, 8:30 to 4:30, and on  Saturdays from 9:00 to 1:00.  Are there any other questions?  Yeah?  (inaudible)  Sure, Sue is a Tyrannosaurus rex  skeleton that was found in South  Dakota.  And it was a private firm that  wanted to prospect for fossils.  They approached the landowner  and said, is it okay if we walk  around on your land?  We're looking for dinosaur  skeletons.  And you know, if we find one, do  you agree to this, effectively a  profit sharing agreement.  And it turned out that they  found a T-rex skeleton that was  named Sue, because the person  who found it, her name was Sue.  It is now in the Field Museum at  Chicago. 

 And it's the most complete T-rex  skeleton that's ever been found.  The problem came when it turned  out that the person they had  talked to wasn't actually the  landowner.  They were leasing the land.  And it was actually on a  reservation.  So, the private firm, the FBI  showed up and shut down the  entire operation.  They were cleaning off the bones  at the time.  And it went through court.  Eventually, the courts decided  that the landowner actually  owned the specimen and then he  decided to auction it off.  So, I believe it went to  Sotheby's and sold for over  $8 million.  And that in itself was  controversial, because museums  don't have a lot of money to be  buying specimens. 

 And so, here's this wonderful  specimen that lots of people  think belongs in a museum.  It's an amazing research  specimen.  But you could have some private  person with $8 million in their  pocket, who could buy it and put  it in their house, and you'd  never see it again.  And so, there were, actually, it  was the Field Museum, McDonald's  and Disney partnered up to buy  it.  So, it was a joint purchase  between the three of them.  It's at the Field Museum.  I don't know how McDonald's  really benefited from it.  (inaudible)  Oh, okay.  And then, Disney, I think,  incorporated casts of the bones  into one of their rides, or  something like that.  It becomes complicated. 

 (inaudible)  I'm not sure.  I don't remember that part,  if it was a close call.  Yes?  (inaudible)   You know, I've heard a few  different things.  I've heard that it had a  different name, like it's  indigenous name is not Devil's  Lake.  It's not like a translation of  the indigenous name.  The one that I'm personally  inclined to believe the most is  that it was named that for  tourist purposes.  It was actually a big tourist  destination for people coming up  from Chicago.  And I read once that you know,  they thought if they named it  something kind of spooky, that  it would attract more people.  But I don't know if that's  actually true.  Yes?  (inaudible)  Oh, it could be. 

 I've also heard that, you know,  people do think that the area is  haunted because in the  wintertime, those boulder  slopes, because of freeze-thaw  cycles where water gets into the  rock and then freezes and pops  the rock.  If you're quiet and you are in  that area in the winter, you can  hear these little popping  noises.  When the wind blows through that  area, it's kind of spooky.  So, you know, you could make an  argument that there is this kind  of haunted element to it.  (inaudible)  Sure, so the question was about  dinosaur eggs.  Dinosaur eggs are, I guess, I  don't want to say are becoming  more popular, but you hear more  about them now.  I think it was something that  initially when eggs were  purportedly being found, people  didn't really believe that you  would be able to find dinosaur  eggs.  But more and more, in many  different countries, you can  find places that are like  nesting sites, where the ground  is apparently littered with  little shards of what is now  fossil, but was dinosaur egg.  And there are some specimens  that you can actually CAT scan,  and you can see a little  skeleton in them, not all of  them.  It depends on the preservational  environment. 

 There's also a very famous site  in Mongolia where there's a  skeleton that's over a nest.  And well, when it was initially  found, they named the animal  that's over the next, wrapped up  over on top of the next, they  named it Ovarapter, which means  egg-stealer, because in their  mind, they thought that this  animal was caught in a  sandstorm, but it was trying to  steal the eggs.  But then, after examining the  eggs and I'm not sure if they've  found small bones in one of  them, but they've been  discovered that in fact, this  animal was the parent of these  eggs.  So, it was more likely  protecting the eggs than trying  to steal them.  Yes?  (inaudible)  The question is, can anybody  book a tour, and whether or not  we need volunteers.  Well, yes, absolutely.  Anybody can book a tour.  We have a minimum of eight  people per group.  And we give tours from  preschoolers on through seniors  groups.  So, all you have to do is check  out our Web site. 

 Or you can come up afterwards  and grab a flyer that has the  phone number on it.  And I'm the person who picks up  the phone.  But you can book a tour.  The tours last about an hour.  And it's $2 per person for the  guided tour.  And as for volunteers, we are,  yeah, we do need people for  various tasks.  We have a support group called  the Friends of the Geology  Museum.  And that's the best avenue to  get into becoming a more active  member with the Geology Museum.  It's also a great way, we go  fossil collecting in the summer,  and we have a behind the scenes  night in October.  So you get to get more of this,  as well. 

 Yes?  (inaudible)  Everything was lost in the fire.  So, there are no specimens  currently in the museum that  date from the first mineral  cabinet.  Yeah?  (inaudible)  You know, I've thought about  that, too.  Can't they go in there and root  around and find some of those?  I've wondered the same thing  myself.  So, I don't know if it's just  because they called it all a  loss, or maybe floors collapsed  and it just would've been too  much of a wreck to try to go in  and sift through and find  individual specimens.  But I've thought the same thing.  Like, you know, lots of museums  have to worry a lot about fire  damage.  But you know, with rocks, there  are minerals in rocks that are  heat sensitive, but it's not the  biggest concern.  Yeah?  (inaudible)  Absolutely.  The question was about  meteorites and whether or not we  have any in the collection. 

 We do.  On display, there's a meteorite  that you can touch that is from  the Canyon Diablo crater, which  is in Arizona.  This is a crater that was  formed, you know, more recently  than 50,000 years ago, but it's  not been all that accurately  dated.  And the specimen we have is a  320 pound chunk of it, so it's  about this big.  It's an iron meteorite, so it's  made entirely out of iron and  nickel.  But also, we have a case that  has probably about 20 meteorite  specimens in it.  In Wisconsin, there have been a  dozen documented meteorite  falls, where a specimen has been  collected from a fall, and been  confirmed as being a meteorite.  And I believe the museum owns  parts of seven of those.  So, we actually have a pretty  good holding of  Wisconsin-specific meteorites as  well.  (inaudible)  Right, typically, vegetated  places, like Wisconsin, are bad  places to find meteorites. 

 It's places that are deserts or  a real top notch meteorite  finding place is Antarctica.  That's where lots of scientists  go to look for meteorites to  study, because it's an icy  field.  And so, if there's a rock out  there, you know, there's a  higher probability that that  rock is actually a meteorite.  If you go outside here and you  pick up a rock, it's a pretty  low probability that it's a  meteorite.  Yes?  (inaudible)  The question is about what do  you find when you go out here in  Wisconsin, in southern  Wisconsin, in the rocks.  The rocks are Paleozoic in age,  which means they are  pre-dinosaur.  They are, most of the ones  around here are about 450  million years old.  They're primarily sedimentary  rocks.  They're limestone and sandstone.  And the limestone, especially,  is very fossilipherous, so you  can find sea creatures in them,  which again, like Kansas, it  seems a little odd that you  would find sea creatures here. 

 But we were, at one time,  covered by an ocean.  And so, you can find, not only  snails and brachiopods and these  animals called cephalopods that  had coiled or straight shells,  but are relatives of octopus.  You can also find jellyfish, not  around here.  There have been jellyfish  fossils found up near Wausau in  some sandstone around there.  Then, what are some of the  animals, and if they've been  identified?  There's actually, oh, at this  point, there wouldn't be plants  in these rocks.  This is pre-plant.  And so, oftentimes, if you ever  see a lot of plant structures  that you can see in rocks, are  actually something called  dendrites, or pseudofossils.  They're actually mineral  surfaces that grow and look a  lot like a plant.  They have this kind of branching  structure.  But they're actually a mineral. 

 So around here, that's what you  would be seeing if it looks  planty.  A book I would recommend that's  specific to Wisconsin is called  "Common Paleozoic Fossils of  Wisconsin," and it's put out by  the Wisconsin Geological and  Natural History Survey.  It's $7, and it actually has a  lot of these creatures  identified out.  It's a good purchase.  Yes?  (inaudible)  A great question.   When we send students out, or we  go out, how do we know where to  go when we want to find things?  Well, the first thing you have  to decide is what you're looking  for.  So, if I'm looking for a T-rex,  I'm going to be looking for a  particular age rock.  So, you pull out your maps and  you find where that kind of rock  outcrops.  And so, if I'm looking for  dinosaurs, I need to move away  from Wisconsin, because we don't  have that age rock here.  We have the Paleozoic rocks that  are older than the age of  dinosaurs. 

 Then we have this big gap in  time until we get to the ice  age, actually, so we're missing  this little part of the  sandwich.  That doesn't mean that dinosaurs  weren't here, it just means that  that layer of rock is gone.  (inaudible)  Well, some of it can be from  glacial erosion, but probably a  lot of it is just because it was  above water.  And when surfaces are above  water, they erode.  So, the places where you get  deposition are typically  underwater in oceans or in  lakes.  When something is what we call  subaerial or under air, it's  being eroded.  So, we have to find the correct  age rock.  So, for dinosaurs, you have to  head west and go to places like  South Dakota, Montana.  And then, once you've isolated,  you know, what rock layer you're  looking for, you just have to go  out and hike around a lot.  We call it prospecting. 

 It's where you get a crink in  your neck because you're just  walking around all day, you  know, looking at the ground.  And then, you know, it takes a  little while to train your eye  to get that image as to what the  bone looks like, because it does  look different in different  locations.  It can be a purplish black in  one spot.  It can be white in a different  locality.  Then, when you find little bits,  you trace them back.  You kind of treat it like a  reverse water flow.  If you find bits at the bottom  of a hill, you kind of start  looking up the hill, to see if  you can trace it to its source.  And hopefully, there's a bone  sticking out of the side of the  hill, and you can then dig back  into the hill.  And hopefully, it's not the end  of the bone, it's like the  beginning.  Yeah?  (inaudible)  Not that I know of. 

 I mean, that kind of stuff comes  up on tours occasionally, but  we've never.  I wouldn't say that there's ever  been a controversy that's  erupted around it.  Yeah?  (inaudible)  Sure, he's asking about  coprolites, which is the fancy  science word for poop, fossil  poop.  And we do, on display.  I'll leave it as a scavenger  hunt for you.  So next time you come, see if  you can find that fossil poop on  display.  But it does have scientific  value, too.  There are scientists who study  fossil feces, because they want  to figure out what these animals  ate.  So you can, again, take these  thin slices and mount them on  glass slides and look carefully,  and figure out what kind of  plants were around at the time,  what kind of critters animals  were eating.  It's valuable. 

 Excellent.  Well, I'll encourage you.  I didn't even mention that there  are specimens that I brought.  But I have some of these  concretions that were in that  special exhibit that I showed  you a photo of.  I also brought along this rock,  which is a slab of limestone,  and it's from around here.  The rock itself is 450 million  years old, or so.  But there are scratches on it  from a glacier.  So, this was a surface during  the ice age, and the glaciers  ground over it, and had little  pebbles locked up in the ice,  and they scratched along the  surface.  So, it has this dual story.  It's old sea mud, and then it  got scratched by a glacier,  probably about 16,000 years ago. 

 But also, even more recent than  that, there's a signature on  here dating from 1970, from the  governor of Wisconsin.  And so, he signed it and put  this lovely sticker on it,  because he had declared November  8-14, as geologist's week.  So this was his token.  I brought that along.  There's a picture.  (inaudible)  You know, it doesn't look  like a whole bunch.  (inaudible)  Nope.  Yeah, it was probably just this  surface, that was at the top of  the ground.  Sometimes, you can go to places.  If this was still in the ground,  it could tell me which way the  glacier went, too, because the  lines or scratches are going to  be parallel to the flow of the  glacier. 

 So, you can also learn, you  know, things about direction.  Then, finally, I brought along  just an example of something  that we collect in the field.  This is beak from a ceratopseon,  something related to like a  triceratops.  So this is part of its mouth.  And you can also see, there's a  good illustration of the glue  that we use, because it's kind  of crumbly and cracked.  But then, also, this is the  field jacket.  So what we do is we uncover the  fossil, then we lay down a layer  of tin foil.  That is just to protect the  fossil from the plaster.  If you put the plaster right on  the fossil, it's going to stick.  So then, we take burlap, cut it  up into strips and dunk it into  plaster. 

 This is always the highlight of  a day when you're in the field.  Because when you've been  crouched up  in this tiny little area,  picking away with a tiny little  dental tool, and then you get to  jacket things.  So you get to whip out the  plaster and dump water, and you  have to do it really fast,  because it's hot and things are  going to cake up and solidify  quickly.  Then you layer on the plaster  and let it harden.  Then you can bring it back.  This is kind of like its little  security blanket for transport.  So with that.  (applause)  Thanks so much.