Excavating Evanston’s Secret Gem

Georgia Kerrigan: For students on a budget, the Evanston museum scene can be hard to track down. Of course, there’s the Block Museum, considered one of Evanston’s best. But with its location right on campus, spending a Sunday afternoon at the Block might not be the most thrilling option for Northwestern students.  

Paul O’Connor: There’s also the Mitchell Center for the American Indian, as well the Grosse Point Lighthouse. But for many students, paying for admission is prohibitive. How can students enjoy a free day at a museum, without hauling all the way to The Art Institute?

O’Connor: Look no further, than Dave’s Down to Earth Rock Shop. 

[Transition: Museum sounds, audio, etc.]

Kerrigan: Located right near the intersection of Main Street and Sherman Ave, Dave’s Rock Shop has been based in Evanston since 1970. 

O’Connor: Its storefront offers a wide selection of items, ranging from rocks, crystals, and fossils, to prints, books, and craft supplies. But many visitors have no idea that one of America’s largest private archaeological collections sits right underneath in the basement. It’s called the Douglas Prehistoric Life Museum and is free to the public.

JAMIE GUSTAFSON: To my knowledge, it’s the largest private collection on display in the US. The shop has been here since 1970. We’ve had three different locations, our third location and the biggest space we’ve had out here so far.

O’Connor: That was *Jamie Gustafson*(he/him), an employee at Dave’s Rock Shop. He says that David Douglas, the museum’s founder, got his start as an amateur archaeologist, exploring Illinois with his family. He came to be one of the Midwest’s most prolific archaeologists and excavators. 

GUSTAFSON: There’s actually a couple of species down here that are named after the Douglas family that they discovered themselves. So they got a lot of their start with some of the stuff you see down there is from Illinois from a formation called the Mazon Creek Formation, which has a lot of really unique plants and animal life, some of which we don’t find anywhere in the world, other than here in Illinois. It used to be this kind of swampy Fern forest about 300 million years ago. And there’s actually a few species that they digging up themselves actually turned out to be new species.

Kerrigan: Jamie says that Dave’s career took him well outside Illinois and even the Midwest. However, many of his most important discoveries took place in Illinois. Specifically, the Tawny Monster. 

GUSTAFSON: This is something that’s not found anywhere in the world, other than here in Illinois, is this weird sort of alien sea creature, and you can see it right there. And so this is rare in that, you don’t– you–  it only comes from here, as far as we know, it’s ever been discovered. And what was unique about this formation is usually soft tissue does not preserve very well, usually it’s bone that does. But in the case of Mazon Creek, we have all of these animals that preserved the soft tissue as well. And they kind of come in these little rock formations, these little nodules with a lot of plants as well, as you see in here. So the Mazon Creek stuff is rare in that it’s from here, and nowhere else, a lot of this a lot of these species. So this is certainly the most unique stuff.

Kerrigan: The museum also boasts a pretty impressive catalog of remains from the Jurassic era. 

GUSTAFSON: So this is an apatosaurus femur, which would be the hip bone of large sauropod from the Jurassic–so what we used to call a brontosaurus. So this is a thing that I think is like, close to six feet. And about 700 pounds.

Kerrigan: And towards the entrance of the basement museum: a beautiful collection of insects, preserved in gleaming sets of amber. 

GUSTAFSON: We have what we call Baltic amber. So a lot of stuff from Poland and around there as well. There’s people who do this and you know, it’s excavated, it’s carved out, a lot of this stuff is polished up, you’ll see. Rough Amber can be not quite as pretty, but this is used for jewelry. It’s used for all kinds of things. It’s believed that Amber is actually the oldest used gemstone, basically, we know this stuff going back 10s of 1000s, if not longer, some early humans using Amber as decorative pieces for jewelry and stuff like that. So it’s believed to be the oldest gemstone that there is.

[Transition: Fade museum sounds, dinosaur sounds, maybe walking up the stairs]

O’Connor: *Susanne Ali* is the co-owner of the museum, alongside her husband James. She says that it’s not entirely clear whether customers know whether there’s a museum underneath the rock shop when they visit.

SUSANNE ALI: We think many times people are surprised when we tell them we have a museum downstairs. They’re like, “Really?” and then they go down to take a look and really enjoy the exhibit. But other times people do come in and say, “Where’s the museum?” You know?

O’Connor: She says that at the core of the museum, is a desire to encourage learning in a way that reaches the community. Promoting education for kids, as well as keeping the museum free, are both essential to this goal. 

ALI: And he just never really thought about having to collect money for it because he just likes to share his passion for fossils. And it’s something we continued with and have added to the museum since we took over as well, too. Before COVID, we had a lot of field trips coming in and also as a selfish point of view, you know, it’s also a great advertising tool, because the school children would come in and then go back and tell their parents, “Oh guess what! I saw a cave bear today,” and their like, “No you didn’t,” and then the parents come back the next weekend and take a look at the store, and the museum as well too, so it’s also an advertising tool. And there’s no need to charge for the museum because, you know, it’s just part of the store.

O’Connor: Jamie echoes this, saying that keeping the museum closely tied with the community, allows them to share their resources in ways that feel personal and special. 

GUSTAFSON: We love having the idea of, you know, people be able to come and get up close. If you go to, you know, a big institution like the field or something like that. You don’t necessarily get the opportunity to get up close. You know, it says Don’t touch but I’m sure people are down here, but you don’t really get that opportunity. And a lot of larger museums, we kind of dig just kind of keeping it small keeping a family and that can come down and experience and really see this stuff close up.

Kerrigan: With David unable to carry on excavations in the future, it raises questions about how this changes the museum’s mission. 

GUSTAFSON: Dave’s retired, he lives in Albuquerque. His vision isn’t that great anymore as he’s getting older. But he’s still, you know, keeps in touch, and we still work with him. But there’s not so much of that going on as far as digging up fossils and stuff like that. That was really his passion.

Kerrigan: But at Dave’s Rock Shop, the mission is more than alive.

ALI: And I guess I guess we hope to keep it going the way it is, you know, it’s it’s a nice business. We got a great crew and, you know, and I think it’s a nice asset to Evanston to have that.

GUSTAFSON: That’s one of the things that was most important to the Douglas family, was giving the opportunity to people come in here and see this stuff without charging people to learn about it. And it’s really about spreading that passion and kind of instilling that in the next generation. That’s what it’s always been about.

For Wnur News, I’m Georgia Kerrigan

And I’m Paul O’Connor. Thanks for listening.

[Outro, museum sounds, dinosaur sounds, movement, talking ambient sounds, etc.]