MPM's collections support team is in charge of making sure that all items in the MPM collection, new and old, are properly catalogued, stored, and conserved in order to ensure that they will be available for research, and in some cases exhibition, for generations to come.
MPM currently houses more than 4 million priceless objects and specimens. Wander through our three and a half floors of exhibits to learn about many of these items. Visit Africa, Asia, Europe, the Arctic, South and Middle America, the Pacific Islands, a Costa Rican rainforest, and so much more!
In the spirit of MPM’s A Moveable Feast progressive dinner fundraiser, Milwaukee chefs and wine experts curated videos.
This first edition Darwin book, published in 1854, was originally cataloged in the San Francisco Library collection. By good fortune, the book was checked out during the 1906 fire that destroyed the building and made its way to the Milwaukee Public Museum's library a few years later.
The publication of this work not only established Darwin's reputation as a biologist, but as a result of the research, he discovered that barnacles represent a transitional stage between hermaphroditism (individuals with both male and female sex organs) and sexual reproduction. This strengthened an important insight of Darwin's – that sexual reproduction was essential for variation in species – and in natural selection, his central mechanism for evolution.
There is a whole color spectrum of fruits and vegetables out there just waiting to be eaten! Join us in the Demonstration Kitchen to find out where fruits and vegetables get their colors from.
Ichthyology (fishes) collection is the largest in the department with about 685,000 catalogued specimens in over 35,000 lots and representing more than 2000 species and 300 families. The majority of the collection is Wisconsin freshwater fishes (29,000 lots), but more than 26 U.S. states and 15 countries are represented.
Using MPM's Distance Learning Technology, students will interact with a naturalist educator from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Learn how people discovered the process of making syrup and sugar from sap, how to identify trees for tapping, view tools for tapping trees and understand the sap to syrup process the old fashioned way.
