Despite receiving its name in 2018 after the passing of its longtime curator, the Jon C. Pigage Natural History Museum and Wildlife Laboratory has been a part of the UCCS campus for decades.
The Natural History Museum is not just a place for people to come in and see the specimens, it is a teaching museum for students, both from UCCS and from nearby school districts. “It’s just a way to show students a broad spectrum of organisms,” curator and adjunct professor of biology Helen Pigage said.
The museum is full of collections of skulls, skins and taxidermized animals that students are able to learn about, sometimes through lab classes in the museum. Local schools also visit to learn about mammals through an owl pellet lab and scavenger hunt about specimens in the museum. “They [students] learn about the evolution of mammals and then they learn to identify skins and skulls and characteristics of groups,” Pigage said.
Pigage was the wife of museum namesake Jon Pigage, who started at UCCS as a biology professor in 1994, when the museum was still on the second floor of Centennial. When he asked for the museum to have a bigger space, the museum moved to Osborne after it was built in 2009.
“We wrapped everything in pink bubble wrap, and we moved everything over here. We had to wheel those guys [some of the larger specimens] across campus from Centennial,” Pigage said.
Pigage shared that there are 650 specimens that UCCS amassed before Jon Pigage began work on the museum, but he had added hundreds of specimens before his passing in 2018.
In the 23 years Jon Pigage spent at UCCS, he left a large impact on the museum. In addition to bringing in hundreds of specimens, a majority of which were roadkill, stillborn or died of natural causes, he personally cleaned many of them.
Arguably the most famous specimen in the museum is the mountain lion. “She was … road kill on I-25. The CPW [Colorado Parks and Wildlife] had an auction and John applied,” Pigage said. The CPW saw that John Pigage represented an educational institution and decided to give him the mountain lion for free.
Now that the Natural History Museum has been endowed, Pigage has dedicated herself to maintaining the museum. “For me, it’s been a place to volunteer for the university, and I do volunteer all of my time here,” Pigage said.
Pigage has also taught multiple classes for the biology department including bacteriology, microbiology and wildlife diseases. “I’m a broadly trained biologist, so I just stepped into whatever they needed me to do.”
“This is my duty to get back here and make sure that by the time I leave here it is ready to hand off to Aaron,” Pigage said, referencing Aaron Corcoran, an assistant professor of biology, who will be taking over the museum after Pigage leaves.
Students can schedule a visit to the museum by emailing Pigage at [email protected].