Did you know that an Irish elk was part of Columbia’s Geological Museum? In 1867, William Willoughby Cole, 3rd Earl of Enniskillen, who was a member of the Geological Society and had amassed quite a collection in his estate near Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, was looking to sell an Irish elk specimen. The trustees’ Committee on the School of Mines discussed the acquisition of the specimen and George Cabot Word personally offered $500 to purchase the fossil for the museum.

George Templeton Strong, a Columbia trustee at the time, kept very comprehensive diaries and he is our best source of information for how the Irish elk got to Columbia. According to Strong, the Committee presented the idea of acquiring the Irish elk to the School of Mines faculty in February 1867 and the purchase was completed in March 1867. It took a while for the specimen to travel overseas and there was a further delay at the ports. Apparently, the Irish elk arrived in June 1867, but the College was not notified until December 1867. By January 1868, the bones were finally set up in the College’s museum. Strong brought his own children, Templeton (age 12) and Louis (age 8) to see the elk. The children were immediately won over: they “returned in a state of wide-eyed wonder and chatted all dinner time about Irish elks.”

Collegiate museums were collections put together for instruction and research, not necessarily open to the public. There is a great series of articles in the Spectator from 1887, after a new Mines building opened and the geological museum had “the full benefit of the illumination furnished by the extensive skylights.” F. H. J. Merrill serves as a tour guide as he describes the various collections, from stones to fossil fish and “upwards of 10,000 specimens of coal, ores, useful minerals, oils, building stones, natural fertilizers, etc., an economic collection unsurpassed in value, intrinsic or scientific.” Merrill claims that “our Geological Museum as a whole is unequaled by that of any institution of learning in the country, and in many particulars is superior to those of Europe.”

In 1897, Columbia moved to its current campus in Morningside Heights and the geological museum collections found a new home in Schermerhorn Hall. However, in 1898 the Irish elk was, unfortunately, still in parts (“a disjointed mass of bones”). Prof. James Kemp asked President Seth Low for funds to hire an expert mounter. According to Kemp, at the time, the fossil was valued at $5,000. The request was funded and by December 1899, the Irish elk was mounted and placed in the lobby of Schermerhorn Hall.

Teaching museums eventually fell out of favor. Some described these as animal mortuaries akin to a “grandmother’s parlor.” In its place, Columbia started collaborating with the American Museum of Natural History in the 1890s. In 1901, Prof. John Strong Newberry’s collection of fossil fish was formally transferred to the AMNH “with the stipulation that it should always be accessible to students of the University.” Columbia graduate students were then able to work with the Museum’s much more extensive collections and in their dedicated facilities. 

In 1943, a number of floors in Schermerhorn Hall (as well as other campus buildings) were taken over by the SAM Laboratories or Special Alloyed Materials Laboratories, part of the research division under the Manhattan Project. According to Paul Kerr, the department head at the time, “the entire collections in paleontology were moved into the corrugated iron shed on the green when the Manhattan District took over the major portion of the first two floors in Schermerhorn Hall.” In 1946, after the military moved out, Schermerhorn Hall was renovated and expanded for the first time since its original construction. The lobby and great stairwell entrance space became a lecture hall. So what happened to the Irish elk? Most likely, he eventually joined his peers at the American Museum of Natural History.