Peabody Museum of Natural History
The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, Connecticut, is one of the oldest and largest university natural history museums in the world. It was founded in 1866 by George Peabody at the request of Othniel Charles Marsh, a leading paleontologist. The museum is best known for the Great Hall of Dinosaurs, which features a mounted juvenile Brontosaurus and the 110-foot mural The Age of Reptiles.
Its permanent exhibits explore human and animal evolution, wildlife dioramas, Egyptian artifacts, local birds and minerals, and Native American cultures of Connecticut.
In 2020 the museum closed for its first major renovation in 90 years and reopened on March 26, 2024 with more than twice as much exhibition space. The building sits at 170 Whitney Avenue and is part of Yale University, supported by about 100 staff members. The renovation added 10 classrooms and a new K–12 education center, and expanded connected facilities including the Kline Geology Laboratory and the Class of 1954 Environmental Sciences Center. The project was helped by a $160 million gift from Edward P. Bass announced in 2018, one of the largest gifts to a U.S. natural history museum.
In November 2021 Yale announced that admission would be free in perpetuity once construction is complete.
The Peabody houses important collections: one of the largest vertebrate paleontology collections in the country, the Hiram Bingham Collection of Incan artifacts from Machu Picchu, a major ornithology collection and library, a large marine invertebrate collection, and the Yale Herbarium. The museum also maintains field facilities, including a field station at Long Island Sound and Horse Island for experiments.
The current director (since 2014) is David Skelly, a professor of ecology. The museum is staffed by curators and researchers from Yale's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Geology and Geophysics, and Anthropology departments.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:29 (CET).