06/30/2026
A new addition to the Museum of Geology exhibits!
The museum has been working for the past year to update a few of the cases in our timeline display that wraps around the central mounts. This has been a collaborative effort between the fossil preparation team and the exhibits team. Darrah Steffen, our Assistant Director, led the charge on this project with planning changes, writing exhibit text, and selecting fossils. Thacher Dramstad (left in photo) has been filling in for Darrah while she’s on maternity leave as our Exhibits and Outreach Specialist.
A number of students and volunteers have put in countless hours in the lab to get specimens ready for display. Isaac, Caleb, James, Elizabeth, DJ (center in photo), and Gracie (right in photo) have all contributed to specimens going on display recently.
The specimen highlighted in this post is a Triceratops brow horn. It was prepared by a volunteer years ago, but never fully cataloged. When Darrah decided she wanted to add in a Hell Creek section to our timeline cases that highlighted the time of the dinosaurs, she knew from the start that Triceratops had to be featured. Her and I looked all over collections for a triceratops horn, and found one that was in good enough condition for display but needed significant prep work. In the time that I was working through the different exhibits projects in the prep lab, I eventually came across the horn pictured here, in great condition and only in need of a new jacket. So this beautiful horn was cataloged and chosen for exhibit instead.
I especially wanted to highlight this specimen because you never know what can be sitting in a museum collection waiting to be displayed, researched, and discovered. Also, for me, this new addition to the Hell Creek case marks the beginning of the end of some of the major exhibit updates we’ve been working on. There are still a few more projects in the lab that need to be finished, but now the empty spaces in our timeline have largely been filled.
