IMPACT SPOTLIGHTS
College’s Mace Brown Museum of Natural History Displays 3 Billion Years of Life on Earth The College’s Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences is home to the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History, which displays more than 1,000 fossil specimens, many from more than three billion years ago, and many collected in and around South Carolina. The exhibitions at the museum also include fossil remains from dinosaurs, Crinoids, Oligocene mammals of North America, Mosasaurs, Cave Bears, Pleistocene mammals of the Carolinas, fossil shark’s teeth, fossil plants, a “Megalodon” shark jaw, freshwater fishes and fossils of Mammoths and Mastodons. Manned by geology majors who work 24 | COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON
as student docents and can answer visitor questions, the museum is free and open to the public. The museum recently acquired a bequest of fossils from Rita McDaniel, mostly collected from the Lee Creek Mine of Aurora, N.C., an open-pit phosphate mine operated by the Potash Corporation. The mine exposes two fossiliferous marine units: the Pungo