ABSTRACT Carl Akeley (1864–1926) started a revolution in museum exhibit design when he created his muskrat diorama for the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1890. It was the first museum exhibit to show an animal in its natural habitat and the first to have a realistic background painted to create the illusion of depth and continuity of the animal’s environment. After the Scientific Revolution began and especially during the “Age of the Marvelous” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, collections of natural and human-made objects were displayed in “wünderkammern,” rooms of wonder or curiosity cabinets, often arranged in a way that we might now consider strange, without a modern understanding of systematics, environmental, or cultural context. From the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century until Akeley’s muskrat diorama, taxonomic groupings dominated museum displays. Akeley’s genius as a taxidermist gave the dioramas an unsurpassed realism. Instead of stuffing animal skins with straw and cotton as taxidermists had done for centuries, Akeley mounted the skins over armatures that he steadily improved as he moved from Milwaukee to the Field Museum in Chicago, and finally to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He modeled ancillary items such as plants in the diorama with obsessive detail. The results were unprecedented evocations of living animals actively engaged in their ecological niches (herein defined as their place in nature, including their activities). Akeley’s focus was the same as that of the great minds of the Scientific Revolution, and it’s the same as scientists’ today: the geometry of nature, its structural detail, and spatial relationships. Akeley showed not only the form and structure of animals in his dioramas, but he also defined the environmental space that encompassed them as well. Akeley’s focus was more mundane than Descartes’s res extensa or Stephen Hawking’s dark matter between cosmic bodies, but Akeley for the first time showed the general public that they could see the form and structure of animals and the space between in an altogether new way. Today that vision has a name, ecology. And we call its conception in deep time, paleoecology.

ABSTRACT 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 examples of the ways science, public audiences, and museums interact and how these interactions have evolved over the past 130 years. The Schoonmaker Reef in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, was the first fossil reef recognized in North America and attracted geologists such as James Hall (1811–1898), T.C. Chamberlin (1843–1928), and I.A. Lapham (1811–1875) to recognize its importance. Fossils from this locality and others in SE Wisconsin form the large Milwaukee Public Museum (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, 1993). The collections, research, and exhibit were the foundation for an innovative website; The Virtual Silurian Reef (VSR) was 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 Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH) in Chicago collections. A larger impact has been the broad audiences reached. The website and exhibit have been used in National Science Foundation–funded educational outreach, by educators, artists, and fossil-hunting kids. 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 fossil specimens have even been used to model bronze fossil play sculptures for a city park.

MPM—Milwaukee Public Museum USNM—United States National Museum UW—University of Wisconsin GOR—Gilbert O. Raasch UC—University of California Two series of locality numbers are carried opposite the specific occurrences in Part I. The whole integers (e.g. 85x) are United States National Museum numbers, such as are listed under “ Localities” in Cambrian Brachiopoda (Walcott, 1912). Correspondingly, most of the specimens from localities designated by these numbers are in the collection of the National Museum. Many of the National Museum numbers in the present text are completely catalogued by Walcott. The second series of numbers embraces the bulk of the material studied, namely that collected by the writer and now deposited in his personal collection, in the collection of the University of Wisconsin, and that of the Milwaukee Public Museum. No catalogue of this series has been printed, but some of the more prominent localities are described in Part III of this paper. The numbers, prefixed with the letter X express the state, quadrangle, specific locality, and, where a section has been measured, the specific bed number. Although many of the localities remain without a published key, their numbers effect a standardization as to the particular lot or faunule. The following abbreviations are used to indicate abundance of fossils at certain localities: AA = Very abundant A = Abundant CC = Very common C = Common CR = Not uncommon R = Rare

ABSTRACT Art about ancient life chronicles the human condition, less evidently but potentially as significantly, as it depicts life through geologic time. Selected examples surveyed here reveal human aspirations, values, conceits, sensibilities, and foibles and suggest that further in-depth study would be warranted. Greek bronzes embellished with griffins (625–575 B.C.E.) may represent ceratopsian fossils mythologized and commodified for their proximity to gold deposits. Encelius’ anthropomorphized drawing (1557) of a fossil bivalve exemplifies a conservative deference to outdated paradigms about nature; inversely, Nicolaus Steno prized geometry—then offering a new perspective on nature—and realized in 1667 that a drawing of “tongue stones” depicted not, as commonly held, simulacra of snake tongues molded by vital forces within the Earth but fossilized teeth of a once living shark; Beringer’s “lying stones” (1726) show how human conceit can bias the interpretation of “fossils.” Artworks since the mid-twentieth century record a growing recognition that ancient life and its habitats evolved together and therefore that art about ancient life has lessons for contemporary environmentalism: Rudolph Zallinger’s diachronous murals (mid-1940s) and the Milwaukee Public Museum’s diachronous dioramas (installed in 2001) display progressions of ancient and contemporary habitats; Alexis Rockman’s dystopian landscapes use ancient and extant life to critique human responsibility for degrading environments and endangering species. We conclude that studies of art about ancient life can deepen our understanding of the human condition and the cultural context in which it is created.

Previous to 1923, knowledge of Cambrian Aglaspida was limited to the published accounts of a few fragments of Aglaspis barrandei (Hall, 1863) and of the dorsal shield of “Aglaspis” eatoni (erroneously presented by Whitfield, (1880erroneously presented by Whitfield, (1882)). Excellent specimens in the possession of the National Museum had not received published notice, and the writer shared the general impression that these organisms were very rare. While in attendance at the University of Wisconsin from 1923 to 1925, however, he was employed to make collections from the Cambrian and Ordovician rocks of southwest Wisconsin, in the course of which increasing numbers of aglaspids were accumulated. These endeavors finally culminated in the discovery, late in 1924, of a locality particularly rich in Merostomata, where a single parting in a relatively limited exposure yielded more than 300 examples including several complete dorsal shields and a large Aglaspis preserving the jointed appendages. ( See Figure 6.) In 1926, the Milwaukee Public Museum, coöperating with the National Museum, afforded the writer the opportunity of working on the aglaspid material at the latter institution, under the tutelage of Dr. C. E. Resser and Dr. E. O. Ulrich. Much of the photographing was done at that time, and a first draft of the descriptions was prepared. From 1929 to 1935, while acting as geological curator at the University of Wisconsin, the writer was afforded further opportunity for making collections and preparing manuscript. The writer’s aglaspid collection and that of the University of Wisconsin were gathered during this period. In . . .

ABSTRACT Katherine Greacen Nelson (1913–1982) achieved many firsts in her career, but sharing her enthusiasm for geology was first and foremost to her. As the first child born into a military family in 1913, Katherine Fielding Greacen was exposed to nature and travel at an early age. By 1934, she received her bachelor degree from Vassar College, winning a prize for excellence in geology. Just four years later, she received the first Ph.D. in geology from Rutgers University and was the first woman awarded a doctorate in any discipline at that school. Soon after, Katherine was hired by Milwaukee-Downer College as the geology/geography department and curator of its Greene Museum. She left campus for the Texas oilfields in 1943 to do her part for the war effort, working as a petroleum geologist and paleontologist. Having returned to Milwaukee-Downer in 1946, she left again in 1954. The newly founded University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) acquired the Milwaukee-Downer campus in 1956, and Katherine became the first faculty member and chair of the geology department. She later brokered the purchase of the Greene collection for UWM and established a public education program at the museum. Serving many professional societies and lay organizations throughout her life, Nelson was the first woman president of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in 1952, and the first woman to receive the Neil Miner Award from the National Association of Geology Teachers in 1978. Throughout her career, Katherine’s mission was to help people understand their surroundings, appreciate geologic time and processes, and feel awe for all that has gone before. To these ends, she put her effort and energy into reaching the widest audience by presenting public lectures, helping geology hobbyists, giving museum tours to schoolchildren, writing popularized articles, and giving media interviews. She even explained the importance of Wisconsin’s glacial features to politicians to help establish the Ice Age National Scientific Reserve. Katherine especially enjoyed taking students into the field, many for their first exposure to the landscape. As a result, she inspired generations of students to share their (and her) knowledge and enthusiasm, which continues to support her goal of putting the appreciation of geology and the landscape on par with cultural pursuits.