Dave’s Down to Earth Rock Shop has been around since 1970, but the contents of its basement have witnessed all of human history and another three billion years beyond that.
Featuring gemstones, fossils and jewelry on the ground floor and a museum in the basement, the shop is one of the largest private-owned fossil collections open to the public in the U.S.
Among the highlights are an apatosaurus femur bone about the size of a human, 3.4 billion-year-old stromatolites, a rhinoceros and hog skull and a raptor dinosaur nest. As avid fossil collectors, the shop founders even have a new genus of spiders, Douglassarachne, named after their family.
A family business
When Dave Douglass was about 8 years old, he frequently visited Mazon Creek in northeastern Illinois with his parents to hunt for fossils. The National Historic Landmark, a known hotspot for fossil hunting, was a swampy tropical ecosystem filled with rich plant and animal life 300 million years ago.
The coal mining industry caused fossils to surface in the area as layers of the Earth were scraped away. After their fossil hunting trips, the Douglass family would repeatedly freeze and thaw the fossil casings they collected until they were brittle enough to break open.
In 1970, the family opened a store on Chicago Avenue to sell their collection, eventually moving locations and opening a free museum in 1987. In 2015, the shop moved again to 711 Main St.
“Dave had a full scholarship to Northwestern University and he skipped out after the first year because he wanted to study geology, but just realized that he’d rather go out there and find it,” Susanne Ali, now a co-owner, said.
Douglass owned the shop for 38 years before selling it to his siblings-in-law Susanne and James Ali.
A look inside
Upon entering the shop, customers are greeted by a miniature sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus rex donning a top hat. The shelves exhibit clusters of gemstones and minerals, a glass case of jewelry and a variety of fossils. According to sales associate Jamie Gustafson, typical customers include geology and paleontology aficionados, curious passersby and jewelry seekers.
Lincoln Park resident CJ Trousdale said they were drawn to the shop by its fossil collection.
“I think the idea that we can access millions of years of geological data and biological data also from fossils is really fascinating,” Trousdale said.
The shop’s basement museum includes fossils from each geological era, Gustafson said. A complete cave bear skeleton, with an open jaw and expansive rib cage, is one of the shop’s most eye-catching specimens. The other cases also house rarities, including insects trapped in amber and a preserved dinosaur nest. Near the front are ancient stromatolites, the oldest type of fossil, sporting natural geometric patterns.
One fossil in the Douglass family’s collection turned out to be a previously unrecognized genus of spiders with spiny legs.
“They had been sitting in the drawer for the last 40 years. And this gentleman down there, when he opened, it’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we haven’t seen this before,’” Susanne Ali said. “And then it gets sent out to England, Scotland, Spain — and they do research on it.”
The Douglasses were provided with the opportunity to name the genus after their family.
Fossil hunting
To acquire their goods, the Alis and other employees frequently go on buying trips, recently returning from an Arizona fossil show. Susanne Ali said that every year at the shows she catches up with familiar fossil vendors, adding that her experience is “more a personal thing than it is just a business.”
Gustafson described the fossil-buying community as wide-reaching but closely knit.
“A lot of these people are characters. I mean, this is what they do. These are people who are out in the field, digging, mining, excavating fossils and things like that,” he said. “They’re spread all over the globe, but they all know each other. They work with each other. And so you build these relationships up over years and years.”
When the Alis bought the business, James was a photographer and Susanne worked in real estate.
For several years, the Douglasses assisted them in their buying trips, allowing them to learn the ropes of the fossil-hunting business.
“We got introduced to the right vendors and got to know the material really well,” Susanne Ali said. “They were also very picky about who they buy fossils from because that’s kind of an unusual field, and so we learned a lot from traveling with them.”
Following their trip to Arizona, the couple’s favorite addition to the store was a large malachite. The vivid green mineral with swirled patterning has stalagmites, natural spiky pillars growing from the bottom.
Dave’s Rock Shop plans to continue its mission of sharing the wonders of ancient Illinois and beyond with the public.
“Our thing is all about education and teaching people,” Gustafson said. “The ‘down to Earth’ part of Dave’s Down to Earth Rock Shop is letting people be hands on, letting people experience it. That was always Dave’s vision, and I think we’re always very conscious about keeping that vision alive and expanding on it as we move forward.”
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