Exploring Connecticut's Natural Wonders

Exploring CT’s Natural Wonders is the popular slideshow program that explains how our state’s small size and intriguing past make it one of the best places in the world to explore natural wonders.

With engaging slides, animations and video, the program takes patrons on a tour of places where continents collided to shape local bedrock, where our region was flooded by vast flows of molten rock, where dinosaurs prowled immense lakes, where the last Ice Age left its marks—and the great variety of wild places we have to explore in our state today.

Learn where our region’s past can easily be explored, often in little more time than it takes to pull off the highway and eat lunch.

Geologists marvel at the incredible diversity of earth history revealed by Connecticut rocks.

This program provides a complete geological history of the state--illustrated with animations, video clips, maps and diagrams--and describes how fundamental geological forces worked over great spans of time to piece together, shape, and carve out our region.

Learn where continents once collided, how molten rock once flowed over and through the surface, how glaciers sculpted our modern landscape and more!

It isn’t the kind of place we imagine when we think about dinosaurs, but the Connecticut River Valley is a place where astonishing discoveries of dinosaur fossils have been made for centuries.

This slideshow tells tales of this real Jurassic Park—the discoveries of strange bones and odd footprints some of the greatest dinosaur scientists in history have made here and what they reveal about the evolution of living things.

The program includes stories few have heard, but that are easily explored, often in no more time than it takes to pull off a highway to eat lunch. Follow in the footsteps of local dinosaur species and more!

When Benjamin Silliman left New Haven for England in 1802 he sailed into “The Heroic Age of Geology” in Europe, a period when modern ideas about the history of the earth first emerged.

When he returned, Silliman brought with him new ideas advanced by many of Europe’s most renowned scholars and began training the first generations of American geologists, paleontologists and ecologists. In many ways, Silliman’s influence is still felt today, as the founder of an unbroken tradition of discovery and environmental research he began more than two centuries ago.

This presentation traces the “Grand Tradition” of environmental science and discoveries Silliman began in Connecticut and continues to thrive in the state today.