Fascinated by fossils, Minnesota man builds a small-town science museum bone by bone

In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”

A small storefront on Main Street in Blue Earth has been home to many businesses since it was built in 1892. Its creaky wooden floor is now covered with fossil displays as the Southern Minnesota Museum of Natural History takes shape.

“In the museum, we have a representation of everything from the very beginning — four-and-a-half billion years ago to today,” said Jim Pollard, the museum’s driving force, as he showed off some of his prized collection.

Pollard, 70, spent his career as an artist, but he’s long been fascinated by fossils. He remembers combing for them as a kid along the beaches of Lake Michigan. His parents also had an eccentric friend whose house was filled with fossils.  

“He knew I was nuts for fossils, and there’d be big nests of eggs and bones and stuff,” said Pollard. “And when I got to Blue Earth, I thought I could make a museum for these kids to sort of have the same ‘wow’ experience.”

“Wow” also works as a response when Pollard tells his own story of how he landed in Blue Earth and why he dedicated himself to creating a natural history museum here.

‘Why treat kids like imbeciles?’

Pollard has been collecting fossils for most of his life. He recovered some from digs in South Dakota and Wyoming and purchased others from locations around the world.

“There’s a nest of eggs, the petrified poo — which is always amusing for kids to see — and we have a triceratops humerus, the end has been bitten off by a tyrannosaur,” said Pollard as he explained his fossil philosophy.

“Everything I collect here is collected because it has a story to it. Otherwise, it’s just a door stop. Because that’s how kids learn, through storytelling,” he said.

The focus is on kids, but you won’t find any glitzy games or plastic dinosaur models here.

“I thought, why dumb down a museum? Why treat kids like imbeciles?” said Pollard. “You know, they’ll rise to your expectations.”

Pollard still finds childlike joy in his collection. He often uses the word “cool” to describe pieces.

He laughed about a recent package from an amateur fossil hunter in Russia who sends him fossils pulled from thawing Siberian permafrost.

“The last thing he sent was a little plastic bag you get in the grocery store, and it was a sopping wet thing, and I opened it up and it’s two mammoth turds inside,” said Pollard. “I thought, my God, you don’t expect that in the mail.”

A prominent display in the museum is a collection of 7,000-year-old bison bones that were saved from a construction site near Coon Rapids in Anoka County about 35 years ago by amateur fossil hunters Pat and René Cherney.

“They walk over and they see the machinery and they look around and they see these bison skulls. And they go, ‘Whoa, these are bison occidentalis, these are extinct bison,’”recalled Pollard who has made the story of citizen science part of the museum’s display.

Pat Cherney died in 2013. His wife René is 67 and still gets excited talking about the two years they spent in the early 1990s digging bones from an old peat bog as heavy equipment worked around them.

René said initially they contacted museums about their find, but no one was interested, so her husband convinced the contractor to let them dig the site.

“We were hoping to find skulls, and we found a lot,” she said in a recent interview at her home. “We called ourselves Rescue Paleontology, because we really felt like we were rescuing the bones.”

A few years ago, she sold the collection to a fossil collector from South Dakota, who in turn sold them to Jim Pollard. She said she’s happy to know “a museum actually has my bones. Pat would be so thrilled, because he knew, darn it, he knew this was important. And I feel like I did a good job of getting the bones where they were supposed to go.”

Finding Blue Earth from a hospital bed

Pollard grew up surrounded by artists. His father was a professional portrait painter, his mother an illustrator. Following in their footsteps, he spent his professional career painting portraits, including generals and members of Congress. 

His life changed in 2009, he said, when during the Great Recession several leaders of finance he had painted refused to pay what amounted to a year’s worth of income.

The stress put him in the hospital and he decided it was time for a change. He borrowed a laptop and from his hospital bed started searching for cheap homes.

“And in Blue Earth there was this house from 1889. It was in perfect shape, original condition, for the price of a used car. And so I bought it.”

He remembered passing through Blue Earth on his way to fossil digs in western states but knew little else about the community.

He started a company with his son making high end pastel paints sold to artists around the world and began to think about ways to give back to the community. 

These days, he’s focused squarely on the museum, which opened last year, and raising money for its future.

“When I am around these fossils, it’s almost like you can sense that that time is still sort of emitting out of the bone,” he said as he stood amid display cases filled with bones. “It’s like a feeling that you get. It’s a little touchy-feely, but kids seem to automatically have that feel. They look at it, and their imagination brings them back in time.”

In the museum, the Cherney bison skulls hang on a wall and are displayed in cases. In a back room there are stacks of plastic totes filled with bones. Pollard plans to build a full skeleton for display.

“And what’s cool about this too is that we have the photographs, we have an oral history interview. We have some of the tools that were used,” said Pollard, who calls the Cherneys’ work inspiring. He hopes the story will inspire kids at the museum.

“This is what you can do if you just decide you want to do it. You just have to be interested. If you learn how to teach yourself, you’re set for life,” he said.

"It's like the Wordsworth poem, ‘the child is father of the man.’ What you do when you're young affects your whole life,” said Pollard. “And so we're trying to get kids hooked on science and fossils are like the perfect way in, because they're big and scary and they're just cool."

• In western Minnesota, she helps new immigrants put down roots
• Minnesota sculptor forges a passion for people who put their lives on the line
• Curious minds keep a southern Minnesota book group going for 142 years