MUSEUMS AT THE INTERSECTION OF SCIENCE AND CITIZEN: AN EXAMPLE FROM A SILURIAN REEF.

Milwaukee Public Museum has been presenting scientific concepts to audiences for 134 years. The exhibit methods have moved beyond specimen display and beyond the museum walls. Today museums bring science to the public and scientific community through searchable collections databases, contextual websites, and social media. The Silurian Reef exhibit, with associated collections, website and online database are an example of the way science, public audiences and museums interact and how these interactions have evolved over the last 30 years.

The Schoonmaker Reef in Wauwatosa, WI was the first fossil reef recognized in North America and attracted geologists like Hall, Chamberlin and Lapham to recognize its importance. Fossils from this locality and others in SE Wisconsin form the large MPM collection. The MPM Silurian diorama, reconstructing one of these reef ecosystems was created in 1985 as part of the Third Planet exhibit. This was one of the earliest museum exhibits to present plate tectonics and the evolution of life as one story. MPM’s Silurian collections were central to published research on the biodiversity and ecology of Silurian communities (Watkins). The collections, research and exhibit were the foundation for an innovative website, The Virtual Silurian Reef (VSR), developed in 1997. The VSR is an educational outreach website that explores the significance of Silurian reefs and concepts of evolution, plate tectonics and biodiversity. More recently, MPM in partnership with the Field Museum digitized our Silurian collections and created a searchable online database housed on a redesigned VSR.

The collections, website, and searchable database have given academic researchers better access to specimens in both MPM and FMNH collections. A larger impact has been the broad audiences reached. The website and exhibit have been used in NSF funded educational outreach, by educators, artists and fossil hunting kids. The images and text from the website and database are found on interpretive signs in local and state parks and on trails that overlook historic collecting localities. The fossils specimens have even been used to model bronze fossil play sculptures for a city park.