Rare minerals, glowing rocks, and fossils unseen for decades emerged from storage April 10, when the campus community got a rare behind-the-scenes look at the Lora Robins Gallery collection during “Escape from ‘the Pits’: Buried Treasures from Our Collection in Storage.”

The event was inspired by Curator of Collections Matthew Houle’s work preparing the museum for its August 2026 reopening in Boatwright Memorial Library following a multi-year closure. As he reviewed the gallery’s approximately 100,000 objects, Houle uncovered items that had been tucked away for decades, many uncatalogued and without identifying information.

“As I was doing this re-curating process and bringing things out, I was finding these great objects, these gems — literally gems, in some cases — that had never seen the light of day,” Houle said. “It was fascinating to me.”

Highlights included a well-preserved skull of a small oreodont, an extinct mammal distantly related to the camel but with no modern descendants. While not especially rare — oreodonts were plentiful during the Oligocene Epoch — its pristine condition makes it notable.

Also on view was a slab of benitoite from California. “Natural benitoite is one of the rarest minerals on earth,” Houle said. “When the crystal is perfect, it can be very valuable.”

Other objects included a citrine geode and a seemingly ordinary rock made largely of calcite that revealed a vivid fluorescent glow under ultraviolet light. The specimen is now on display in the fluorescent minerals room and part of the gallery’s fluorescent minerals collection, one of the largest such collections in the country.

With only a fraction of a museum’s collection ever on public view, the event offered attendees insights into both the depth of the collection and the curatorial process.

“I didn’t even know about the Lora Robins Gallery until I became an Osher student,” said Sharyn Campbell, a second-year Osher Lifelong Learning Institute member. “I never took any classes in school where I learned much about what you have displayed here, so it’s been a nice introduction later in life”

Houle hopes to continue offering similar programs, giving visitors a chance to see — and even handle — objects that would otherwise remain out of view.

“It’s a lot of fun detective work for us to figure out what the objects are and where they came from,” Houle said. “I like the idea of letting people peek bit behind the curtain and get an idea of what we’re thinking and why we make the choices to show what we do.”