A CRETACEOUS MOMENT: INCORPORATING LOCAL GEOLOGY TO PROMOTE VIEWER UNDERSTANDING OF THE EARTH SCIENCE LITERACY PRINCIPLES

The Dunn-Seiler Museum is a small, traditional museum housed in a geosciences department on a university campus. Numerous specimens of minerals, rocks, and fossils reveal Earth’s variety and past fossil diversity. Most of the exhibits are non-themed, with the exception of a few displays on mass extinctions, karst, and a small meteorite collection.

The majority of visitors to the university museum are K-12 students (especially grades 4-9) and undergraduate students enrolled in geology laboratory classes who visit the museum for extra credit assignments. The museum staff, operating within time and funding constraints, is currently seeking alternatives to the traditional display format in order to more actively engage visitors, and present geological content in a larger Earth system framework to facilitate viewers’ “big picture” understanding of our planet. The “Geology of Mississippi” showcase, with special focus on locally-exposed Cretaceous marine strata, is our first alternative exhibit attempt—within the museum’s traditional display-case format.

With this new display, we hope to tap into our visitors’ geological sense of place, and include familiar fossils which s/he has observed in the local environment. The new display features specimens of fossil invertebrates (e.g. Exogyra, ammonites) and vertebrates (e.g. crocodiles, mosasaurs). In developing the new Mississippi display, we focused upon some of the big ideas of the Earth Science Literacy Principles: We incorporate Big Ideas 2 (Earth is 4.6 billion years old), 4 (Earth is continuously changing), and 6 (Life evolves on a dynamic Earth and continuously modifies Earth) to portray the geological history of the state, the major changes in the local environment since the Cretaceous seas, and the changes in life forms throughout Mississippi’s geologic past. To extend the geology content and provide a hands-on experience, the museum also offers a fossil-collecting excursion to our local campus Cretaceous outcrop. By comparing the museum specimens to local outcrops, visitors are able to more readily understand geologic time, and evolution of both Earth and life forms. With the new display, we attempt to promote a more scientifically literate view of the complexity of the Earth system, particularly as it relates to our state.