DARWIN DISCOVERY DAY, A COLLECTIONS-BASED, INTERACTIONS-FOCUSED, ANNUAL PUBLIC OUTREACH OPPORTUNITY

Darwin Discovery Day (DDD), now in its 15^th year as the Michigan State University Museum’s contribution to the international observance of Charles Darwin’s birthday, provides an annual opportunity to showcase natural science collections and to provide one-on-one interactions between visitors and natural science faculty and students. The event accomplishes two, interdependent goals: demonstrating, through personal experience and discovery, the importance of specimens in understanding the history and diversity of life on earth, and communicating, through face-to-face interactions, how scientists use specimens in their research. Collections-centered DDD activities emphasize hands-on opportunities with specimens from the teaching collections and include a behind-the-scenes guided tour of the research collections. Other activities support our interactions goal, for example, a scavenger hunt includes the task of asking a scientist a question, to encourage conversation between visitors and researchers. DDD is advertised as an opportunity for visitors to bring in rocks, fossils, and other natural objects for identification; our answers can be confirmed by comparison to similar specimens from our collections. In a cultural climate in which “seeing is believing”, events like Darwin Discovery Day highlight the essential role that museum collections play in connecting the public to the actual objects on which we base our hypotheses and to the real people who do the research.