Fossils were present at the birth of Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) in 1831, and were placed in a natural history museum 40 years later. The brownstone museum was funded by agricultural chemist Orange Judd, whose son-in-law, ichthyologist George Brown Goode, became its first curator (1871-1877) at the age of 20 years. Goode became a distinguished museum scientist, as assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in charge of the US National Museum. The heydays of the Wesleyan Museum were from 1871 to 1910, with collections increasing to several 100,000s of specimens, many donated by Goode and other alumni, and supplied by S Ward Loper (curator 1893-1910), a self-taught collector of Connecticut Triassic-Jurassic fish. Loper also collected extensively for the Wesleyan Museum while working for the USGS (late Eocene plants and insects, Florissant, CO; fish, plants and insects, early Eocene Green River Formation, WY), obtained collections from Mazon Creek (IL; Pennsylvanian plants) and Crawfordsville (IN; Mississippian crinoids), and sampled Ordovician fossil assemblages at Canyon City (CO) with Charles D. Walcott. Interest waned in the 1930s, and the museum closed in 1957. Specimens were returned to the Smithsonian, placed on indefinite loans, or donated to schools and museums, with the remainder stored in an unsecured basement. Collections were transferred to a new science building in 1971, but not inventoried, and many specimens were found to have been lost or damaged. In 2017, students started to inventory and digitize the collections, making information in accession books and library archives available in Specify, and adding photographs. Students construct permanent and temporary exhibits in the museum and elsewhere on campus (e.g., display of Ward's casts of plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, a mosasaur and Glyptodon), conduct Open Houses, advertise fossil collections throughout campus so that faculty outside the sciences (arts, history, history of science) know how to use our collections in teaching, and assist in teaching activities for children in the Middletown community.  We aim to make the paleontological community aware of our collections of never-studied materials from famous lagerstaette through our Specify portal, while students in a range of disciplines are discovering multiple 'lost worlds': extinct life forms, evolution and extinction of ecosystems, but also history and evolution of late 19^th - early 20^th century science and scientists, at Wesleyan and in the world.