Mace Brown’s lifelong passion for collecting and recording fossils was sparked by a rock collection when he was 13. By age 45, he had amassed a collection of more than 87 species of shark teeth. For the next 15 years, Brown expanded his collection with fossils from around the world. Recently, Brown donated more than 1,500 rare fossil specimens valued at more than $1.6 million to the College of Charleston’s School of Sciences and Mathematics to establish the Mace Brown Natural History Museum.
Mace Brown
The collection contains some of the world’s best specimens – meaning intact fossils, not casts or plastic replicas – and was recently visited by two different groups of scientists from the Smithsonian National Natural History Museum, where the collection is gaining recognition.
“We are so pleased to have this exquisite collection of fossils at the College,” says College of Charleston President P. George Benson. “This priceless resource will bring national and even international recognition to the College and be enjoyed by students, faculty, staff, visitors, and school children for generations to come. We are extremely grateful to Mace for his generosity and his leadership in helping the College create the Mace Brown Natural History Museum.”
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The collection focuses on North American land and sea creatures. More than 90 percent of the fossilized creatures in the collection inhabited South Carolina over a span of nearly 400 million years ago. The visually stunning collection includes complete skeletons of mammals such as a giant armadillo, a cave bear, and a saber-toothed cat. In addition, there are Tyrannosaurus rex teeth; Triceratops horns; saltwater mosasaurs with snakelike detaching jaws; skeletons of a warthog-looking, buffalo-sized pig; and a dog-sized horse and camel. The collection also contains some of the best preserved specimens of ancient whales and porpoises in the world.
“I wanted the collection to be in Charleston, in a location where fossils were the focus and a place where the public could see the specimens up close, not stored in cabinets out of the sight of the public,” explains Mace Brown, a Mount Pleasant, S.C., businessman and international fossil collector.
The Mace Brown Natural History Museum is housed on the second floor of the College’s new School of Sciences and Mathematics Building and offers South Carolinians access to the rare collection. Scientists claim that parts of the collection rival the Chicago Field Museum and the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum for the quality of specimens and the number of new species that have yet to be classified. In the last year, four different groups of researchers from around the world have used the collection as part of international research publications on Oligocene cetaceans and sirenians.
The collection represents an extraordinary educational research resource for college students not only at the College but also from universities across the Southeast. At least three departments at the College – biology, geology, and anthropology – are using the collection to enhance the student experience, and Brown himself is teaching a vertebrate paleontology lab each week.
[Related: Learn more about the Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences.]
The collection will provide tangible science outreach to the Lowcountry, offering K-12 students and residents the opportunity to tour, explore, and learn about the natural history and evolution of our Lowcountry environment.
Brown’s work has spanned a lifetime, collecting, preserving and documenting rare and one-of-a-kind fossils from across the globe. And to think, it all started with a rock collection.
