Rock star

Mark Zurolo ’01MFA

View full image

Peabody Museum director David Skelly wants you to look at this massive purple geode in the museum’s newly opened gem and mineral gallery. And he wants you to think it’s fantastic. “The first reason you are looking at it,” he says, “is because it’s a beautiful thing that came out of the earth.”

When Skelly visited the Peabody as a child, he was awed by the dinosaurs—an awe that led eventually to his career as a professor of ecology. He wants visitors to feel just as awed in the new gallery, which was opened as part of the Peabody’s 150th anniversary. (He won’t require you to become a geologist.) The gallery has minimal signage; a downloadable app, created by Leo Shimonaka ’18 with text by Duncan Keller ’21PhD, provides as much or as little information as the user wants. That giant geode? It’s three feet high, comes from Uruguay, and is lined with amethyst and some white calcite crystals.