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The Middle Tennessee Museum of Natural History

For those driving past the nondescript warehouse at 816 Old Salem Road in Murfreesboro, the last thing they might expect it to contain is hundreds of millions of years of fossils, gemstones and other natural history in a museum known as “Earth Experience.”

“The joke that we always get told is you are a hidden gem in Murfreesboro,” museum co-founder and Executive Director Alan Brown said.

Known as Earth Experience: The Middle Tennessee Museum of Natural History, the museum officially opened nine-years ago by Brown and late co-founder Lewis Elrod.

Visitors to the museum will first make their way through an exhibit featuring dinosaur fossils and other Ice Age era fossils.

“Most of the things out in the open are cast copies of original fossils, but they are scientifically accurate, we can still do scientific work on this,” Brown said.

Brown points to a Woolly Rhino cast, and then to an actual Woolly Rhino fossil in a display case.

A significant number of artifacts in the room have been collected by Brown during summer dinosaur digs in Montana.

“I was actually digging in Montana for about four or five years before the museum started,” Brown said. “one of the things was a catalyst for getting the museum started was I started getting all these dinosaur bones, they could sit in a garage somewhere or we could put them out on display and everyone could see them.”

When it comes to his favorite find, Brown shares a sentiment with many collectors and archeologists.

“I always like to say my favorite find is the next one,” he said. “There is just something super awesome about coming across a fossil that nobody has ever seen before.”

That said, Brown said if he had to pick, one of his top finds of all time would have to be a bird fossil from the time of the dinosaurs.

“They are really rare because they break down so fast,” he said.

Other dinosaur bones in the collection include Triceratops, T-Rex, Atlantosaurus and different types of raptor.

As visitors make their way through the museum, the collection goes further and further back in time.

One display focuses on fossils discovered in Tennessee.

“The most common fossil in Middle Tennessee is something called a crinoid,” Brown said. “They look kind of like plants but they are actually animals, they are related to starfish. I would always describe it to be people as an upside down starfish on a stick.”

While the tentacles of the crinoid decompose fairly quickly, the stalks fossilize fairly easily and can resemble a row of coins.

In addition to its fossil collection, Earth Experience also features a collection of minerals and gemstones.

One area of the museum features a large collection of minerals collected from the Elmwood Mine located in Carthage, Tennessee.

While the mine is a zinc mine, it was not uncommon for miners to uncover a variety of mineral specimens.

“Sometimes they find these little pockets that have these big crystals in them and they used to allow the miners to collect those and Lewis Elrod would buy the minerals directly from the miners and so we have a huge collection,” Brown said.

Before leaving, visitors can have their photo taken with what Brown calls their star attraction, a life-size cast of a T-Rex skeleton.

Nine years after its founding, Earth Experience still operates as a privately owned museum with a small team of dedicated volunteers and part-time employees.

“We have a small space and we have a slot of stuff crammed into this small space,” Brown said. “We could easily fill five times this space if we could just get the city or the state or a corporation or somebody to get behind us so we could get a bigger space.”

Brown said that while that has not happened yet, he is optimistic it will someday.

As for what he finds most rewarding, Brown said it would have to be the appreciation museum visitors show for the rare collection of artifacts and the opportunity to view them and learn.

“It is almost on a daily but definitely on a weekly basis somebody says, ‘thank you for what you do’,” he said. “There is nothing more rewarding than someone just acknowledging what you have done and thanking you because there is nothing like this anywhere else in Tennessee and even most of the states around Tennessee.”

Earth Experience is currently open, 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday for its summer hours.

For more information, visit www.earthexpereince.org.