Before there was a museum, there was a canoe. There was a trek to the Upper Peninsula, where a researcher was armed with a keen eye and a hardbound notebook. There was a ditch digger on a farm near Owosso, Michigan, whose power shovel struck bone. There was an excavation in Egypt and another in Tunisia. There was an explorer who criss-crossed South America by riverboat and on foot to understand the vast diversity of life on Earth.
Before there was a museum, there was an item, a collection, a quest. On Michigan’s first day of statehood in 1837, its new legislature commissioned an enormous task: surveying the geology, plants, animals, and fossils of the new state and establishing a “Cabinet of Natural History” at the University of Michigan to preserve what was found. That early commitment helped kickstart U-M’s extraordinary legacy of museum-based research, teaching, and public engagement—and formed the basis for five of the six museums at LSA. Here, we look at some of the foundational items at those five museums plus the sixth LSA museum, the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.
Nearly 80 years after that first statewide survey, the animal specimens had become so numerous that the Regents established a separate Museum of Zoology. Remarkably well-preserved examples of these earliest zoological collections include a short-eared owl (Asio flammeus) collected by Dr. Abram Sager as part of the state’s first biological survey (above) and lake chubs (Couesius plumbeus) collected by Louis Agassiz in 1848 in Lake Superior (below), as well as the lizard at the top of the page. Thanks to nearly two centuries of museum care, these specimens now provide irreplaceable evidence of Michigan’s past and continue to reveal how its biodiversity changes through time.
(Above) Brett Benz/UMMZ. (Below) Leisa Thompson/Michigan Photography
Many of the U-M Herbarium’s earliest collections came from state geologist Douglass Houghton. (Above) This Adenocaulon bicolor (American trailplant) was gathered near Sault Ste. Marie in 1826. (Below) One of Houghton’s personal herbarium volumes is open here to a specimen of Lonicera hirsuta (hairy honeysuckle), collected at Sault Ste. Marie, Chippewa County, in 1831. The identification by Houghton is written on one side of the label, says Anton A. Reznicek, curator emeritus of vascular plants. Dr. Zina Pitcher, a medical botanist like Houghton and one of the first U-M regents beginning in 1837 (not to mention a mayor of Detroit, president of the American Medical Association, and namesake of an Ann Arbor street), contributed collections to the Herbarium as well. In all, the Herbarium has 1.7 million specimens.
(Above) This 21-foot-long dugout canoe is in the lobby of the Research Museums Center south of campus as part of UMMAA’s collections. Jim Peshegoba from Hubbard Lake in Alcona County, Michigan, carved it more than 100 years ago. (Below) The “Seven-Star Flag” shows the Big Dipper. It was displayed at the Chinese pavilion during the 1884–85 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, and gifted along with the entire Chinese delegation’s collection to U-M, negotiated by President James Angell. These are among the more than three million archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, comparative specimens, and more at UMMAA.
The UMMP, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, traces its roots to the aforementioned Cabinet of Natural History. Its first fossil specimens are from Douglass Houghton’s 1837–1845 survey, including this nautiloid shell (above) collected from the Upper Peninsula in August 1839. Fossils like this capture a time hundreds of millions of years ago when Michigan was in the Southern Hemisphere and covered by a warm, shallow sea. Houghton documented his findings in detailed field notes like those pictured below. UMMP is marking its centennial with a temporary Library of Life exhibit at the U-M Museum of Natural History, which also displays parts of the research museum’s collection in its permanent galleries.
The Kelsey Museum’s first accessioned object and one of namesake Professor Francis Kelsey’s early acquisitions was this Christian lamp fragment from Carthage acquired in 1893 (below, right). One of U-M’s archaeological excavations at Karanis, Egypt, is represented by the seated priest statue (below, left). A fresco cycle at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii is depicted in the museum’s nearly life-size paintings, one of which is represented above. The paintings were commissioned by Francis Kelsey and painted by Maria Barosso between 1925 and 1927.
The museum now known as UMMNH, primarily devoted to exhibits and educational programs, was spun off in 1956. One of its earliest exhibits featured the Owosso Mastodon (one of many U-M Museum of Paleontology specimens on display at UMMNH). A ditch digger found the 11,000-year-old remains on a farm near the mid-Michigan city of Owosso in 1944, and this fossil has been a regular feature of the museum for decades. Today, the seven-foot-tall specimen can be found in the five-story atrium of the museum in the Biological Sciences Building. The museum had more than 125,000 visitors in 2025.
Special thanks to Emily Allison-Siep, Jen Bauer, Andrea Blaser, Alison Davis Rabosky, Theresa Frasca, Matt Friedman, Jim Moss, Elizabeth Noll, Anton A. Reznicek, Adam Rountrey, and Elliot Zirulnik.
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