Most of the specimens in the museum were collected from sites in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain region. They were first used by Eleanor Barbour Cook in her own classes, and later shared with visitors. The importance of the collections was recognized when Crites Hall was designed in the 1930s. Mrs. Cook, with help from her father E.H. Barbour and CSC president Robert Elliott, built museum exhibits into the new building’s basement gallery. Notable donors included Mrs. Cook’s husband Harold Cook and her sons-in-law Grayson Meade and Paul McGrew, along with Edwin Crites, Charles H. Morrill, E.F. Schramm, Edith Harris, F.D. Figgins, Gordon Fletcher.

The early museum was more of a “natural history” museum than one strictly devoted to geoscience. The early collections contained 585 vertebrate fossils, 637 invertebrate fossils, 700 minerals, 284 modern shells and corals, 111 mounted birds, and 19 mounted mammals.

In 1970 a new science building was constructed, and Professor Arthur Struempler built an exhibit space in the basement. This became the geology museum and was used to support classes until the building was remodeled in 2020. Professors Larry Agenbroad, Eric Gustafson, Darryl Tharalson, Jennifer Balmat, and Michael Leite contributed to its exhibits. During the 1980s, the biggest field collecting program in the college’s history, headed by Gustafson, doubled the number of vertebrate fossils in the collection. In 1997, the museum was renovated by Leite and renamed the Eleanor Barbour Cook Museum of Geology.

The new geology museum was opened in the fall of 2023 in the Math-Science Center for Innovative Learning (COIL). For the second time in its history, the museum moved into a space specially designed for exhibits, the largest space ever. Behind the scenes, the vertebrate fossil collections now benefit from a state-of-the-art storage facility and online database which enhance their research value.