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Annual Darwin Discovery Day event aims to get public excited about science

February 9, 2015

MSU Museum employee shows kids a fossil at Darwin Discovery Day hosted at the MSU Museum.

Photo by Jessica Sattler | The State News

Throughout Sunday afternoon,  crowds of all ages and backgrounds filled the halls of the MSU Museum for the annual Darwin Discovery Day.

Now in its 11th year, Darwin Discovery Day was created as a way to "connect the university to the community at large and present work and collections in an engaging way," the museum's acting director Lora Helou said.

She said that the goal of the event is to "make science accessible and relatable" to the public and give "something for people to experience and get excited about."

According to Helou, there were between 60 and 70 volunteers working with museum staff on the event and contributing their knowledge to the discussion. As many of those volunteers are also students, the event provides them with the opportunity gain experience with outreach programs and public relations.

For the public, Darwin Discovery Day offered the chance to meet with leaders in many fields over the course of just a few hours.

"I think it’s a nice opportunity to have exposure to not only what science is, but who does science, and all in one spot. You can see neat things and talk to scientists and I think that’s a rare opportunity these days," the museum's science education specialist Julie Fick said.

Popular events included photos and interviews with Charles Darwin, who was portrayed by MSU Darwin Scholar Dr. Rich Bellon, the Herpetology Club's hall of reptiles and amphibians and a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum's vertebrate collections to provide a unique perspective of the museum typically unavailable to the casual visitor.

The behind-the-scenes tour, led by vertebrate collections manager Laura Abraczinskas, attracted long lines of visitors throughout the day and wove through the third floor of the museum. 

Visitors were able to view specimens collected from the very beginning of the museum's founding up until today. Of particular interest was the partial skeleton of a mastodon originally unearthed in 1966 that was donated to the museum last fall from a family in Livingston County, who had the specimen in their basement since its discovery nearly 50 years ago.

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