The Milwaukee Public Museum has more than four million artifacts in its collections, including many rocks and fossils that tell the history of the world. If you head to the geology department in the basement of the current museum space, you'll find wall-to-wall cabinets filled with rocks, fossils, and minerals.
One of the largest collections was found here in Milwaukee itself. It's part of a body of rock and fossils known as the Milwaukee Formation, created over 400 million years ago when the land now known as Wisconsin was located deep below the water, near the equator.
"A lot of this material was salvaged when... the City of Milwaukee was digging a new intake tunnel," says Patricia Coorough Burke, curator of the geology collections.
Many of these fossils have never been seen on the museum floor, and there are many reasons for that, as Coorough Burke explains.
"There's only so many things you can display and relate any information about those things. The other part is that some of these things are down here in this drawer, but they're used by scientists," she says.
