UI Museum of Natural History: More than a museum

By Diane Heldt
The Gazette

IOWA CITY — The giant sloth is sort of the unofficial mascot at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History.

Sarah Horgen, education coordinator for the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, cleans mud from a bone of a giant sloth at the museum in Macbride Hall on the UI campus in Iowa City. The bones were recently excavated from the Tarkio Valley Sloth Project in southwest Iowa. Photo by Brian Ray.

“We’ve had people get married in front of the sloth,” Pam White, director of UI Pentacrest Museums, said. “The sloth, it’s mostly beloved, although there are some kids that it scares to death.”

The museum’s sloth display — and the ongoing Tarkio Valley Sloth Project excavation in southwest Iowa led by UI researchers and students — continues to be an important draw and topic of research.

But as the Museum of Natural History kicks off its 150th anniversary celebration, officials say in a collection that numbers more than 100,000 items, the treasures extend far beyond the mysterious ice age mammal.

“I hear a lot of people say ‘it’s incredible Iowa has something like this,’” Sarah Horgen, the museum’s education coordinator, said. “Some people say they never knew this existed.”

The Museum of Natural History started in 1858, housed in the Senate chambers of the Old Capitol. It moved to its current home in Macbride Hall in 1907, and it’s the second-oldest museum west of the Mississippi River. About 30,000 visitors, many of them elementary students, passed through the exhibit halls last year.

The museum was launched as a teaching and research tool in the natural sciences. Early expeditions by UI faculty and students to New Zealand, Hawaii, the Fiji Islands and Manitoba helped build the collection of specimens.

“It was very common to bring back specimens so people could learn about these animals and birds and insects and leaves that were so far away,” Shalla Wilson, assistant director of UI Pentacrest Museums, said.

That research and teaching mission is still an important part of the museum, officials said. UI students in biology, archaeology and anthropology use the collection. And the sloth excavation, where the skeletons of one adult and two juvenile sloths have been found near Shenandoah, is a major project.

Museum info:

Location: Macbride Hall on the University of Iowa campus, at the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets.
Regular hours: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Thursday and Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday: 1 to 5 p.m. Summer hours (June and July): open until 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Closed Mondays and national holidays.
Admission: free
Contact: (319) 335-0480

© Gazette Communications 2009