Northern Maine
Museum of Science
In the early 1970s, the University of Maine in
Presque Isle, Maine, was the recipient of two excellent
donations of natural history collections; one from local well
known Aroostook County naturalist, Leroy Norton, and part of the
now defunct Portland Museum of Natural History. The Norton
collection would bring in big collections of fresh water sea
shells, the start of their herbarium and local forestry
specimens, as the museum began to grow. It officially opened in
1994, with a great donation of five display cases from NYNEX,
that is now Verizon, with numerous other individuals from the
county and state donating time to get the museum opened by 1996.
It is located at Folsom Hall on the campus, but the majority of
the displays are located along the walls and hallways of the
college hall, with some great exhibits. These include; whale
vertebra, whale jawbone, dolphin models, Are Birds Dinosaurs?,
snowy owl, pterosuar display in wall case, Diversity of Life
which is an 18 foot overhead display, pterosaur model and the
Evolution of Life, that are located around the building's
entrance and north stairwell. Those located on the third floor
relate to geology and biology and include; minerals of the
state, meteorology station, coral reef exhibit and mural,
scientific research in northern Maine that is in a rotating
exhibit, Atlantic leatherback sea turtle, herbarium exhibit,
owls, lichen, 600 million years of earth history, woolly
mammoth, shark teeth, Leroy Norton exhibits, Maine slate,
passenger pigeon, cephalopods, fossil fish from Wyoming,
trilobites, fossil plants of Carboniferous period, exhibits from
geo-ecology club field trips, pertica quadrifaria (the Maine
state mineral), the abacus, Tourmaline (the Maine state
mineral), insect and spider exhibits including those in the
south stairwell, insect coloration and camouflage, geological
timeline and more, including those on the second floor.
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