Peabody Museum set to reopen later this month
NEW HAVEN — After three and a half years the Yale Peabody Museum is reopening on March 26 to allow the public to see the extensive updates made since it closed for renovations in March 2020, shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic began.
“We’ve got a little more work to do but we’re going to do a soft opening to the public,” said David Skelly, director of the Peabody Museum. “What you’re seeing is a combination of eight-and-a-half years of planning and three-anda-half years of construction and almost a year of exhibit installation.”
The Peabody has added about 15,000 square feet of exhibit space and new galleries. The entire second floor, which was previously occupied by administrative offices, has been converted into gallery space. Classrooms and public space have been added to create community learning space.
“What I’ve hope we’ve done ... is really renew the way that the Peabody presents and how we interact and provide something to the public as well as the Yale community,” said Skelly, indicating a gallery for teaching and a studentled exhibition. “We’re bringing other voices into the museum.”
Interested museum-goers can go to the Peabody museum website at https:// shop.peabody.yale.edu/#/ Admission to reserve a time for visits during the soft reopening. The museum is using the reservation system for the first 30 days to control crowds while final touches are added. Admission is free and will continue to be free after the soft reopening period has expired.
The museum offered area media a sneak peak through its exhibits ahead of the soft opening with staff leading a tour through time, outlining the story of the earth and how life grew, evolved, died, and changed over millions of years.
As you enter the new Central Gallery you’re greeted by an Archelon, a giant sea turtle, posed fleeing for its life from a Tylosaur, an extinct marine reptilian predator.
The fossil turtle was discovered missing a rear fin. Scientists were able to see that the fin had been bitten off and healed before the turtle died. Skelly said that the paleontology curators had inadvertently conjured a scene he had imagined as a child visiting the Peabody — a pursuit out of a nature documentary.
“I’ve been coming here since I was 5 years old and I used to stare at that turtle for a long time,” said Skelly. “My childhood fever dream has been brought to life ... that scene played out in my
head when I was a kid here. It’s wonderful having it and doubly wonderful that I had nothing to do with it. It was the paleontology curator’s idea.”
Growth, change, evolution and extinction
A major theme of the renovated Peabody Museum is the story of changing life on Earth. Visitors walking into the Burke Hall of Dinosaurs are greeted by massive ammonite fossils, ancient relatives of the modern-day nautilus. Strange fossils from the Edicaran and Cambrian eras are displayed next to models reconstructing unusual, shrimp-like bodies.
“Most of the material here is from oceans before the time of the dinosaurs,” said Susan Butts director of collections and research. “We have a large portion of the gallery devoted to sea scorpions. The Peabody has the largest sea scorpion collection in the world … we’re delighted we have the opportunity to put these out on display, which we didn’t before.”
Trilobites and sea scorpions emerge and give way to a giant red portal, marking
off the first mass extinction event at the end of the Permian era where 95 percent of all life in the oceans died.
“One of the things we want to impress on visitors is that when one thing dies out, another thing takes over in its place,” said Butts. “A new type of animal evolves.”
Butts pointed out that scientists knew the way animals walked on land first evolved in the water. Over millions of years those limbs and patterns of motion changed to allow for running, climbing, bipedal motion and eventually, flight. That story, from crawling out of the ocean, to standing on two legs, to flying, is illustrated using fossils.
“That motion when you’re capturing prey, moving your arms forward and back to your body, that becomes the flight stroke,” said Butts.
She also pointed out various updates to star attractions — the Brontosaurus and Stegosaurus. The Brontosaurus was posed dynamically with its whiplike tail counterbalancing its long neck and head stretched high above museum
visitors. The Stegosaurus was crouched down defensively, its neck plated in protective bones.
Some of the dinosaurs had different bones before the renovation. Bones now known to belong to older or younger Stegosaurus specimens were replaced with bones more proportional to the age of the dinosaur on display.
The museum will also feature a display on dinosaur color. Scienctist have been able to isolate the color of dinosaur feathers and eggs when alive. Color isn’t just nice to look at, it tells us a lot about how animals once lived.
“White eggs stand out, you don’t want to leave your white eggs in the open,” said Butts, noting that alligators and crocodiles bury their white eggs. “So we know if we find egg shells that only show us white color, that they buried their eggs.”
Leaving the world of dinosaurs, another mass extinction portal takes visitors through to a different gallery of mammal life spanning the past 66 million years. A major theme here is climate change. Chris Norris director of
public programs said that at the start of mammalian life the world was much warmer, which is shown in fossils collected from Wyoming.
“You can look at the fossil record for the last 66 million years and see two profound changes,” Norris said. The first is the violent, obvious change in animal and plant life after a meteor struck the Yucatan Peninsula, wiping out non-bird dinosaurs. The second is a slower, more subtle change to a cooler world. “At the end of 66 million years ... the planet is actually different. The planet we live on now is not the same planet that giant dinosaurs lived on.”
As humans come on the scene, the world is in an Ice Age and covered with massive mammals. The museum features a new display exploring the complicated growth of humans and our hominid cousins.
“We have a great display of human evolution and we’re talking about the amazing ways that humans interact with the environment that allowed us to thrive,” said Skelly.
New galleries, new voices
Upstairs the museum features a new gallery on the history of science. Instruments, mechanical computers, telescopes and early cameras line the walls. A display of scientific glassware takes up a prominent portion of the room. None of these collections had permanent homes before.
It’s here that the Peabody curators begin to show part of their new approach to history. A display of Yale’s involvement with the eugenics movement, a pseudoscientific and racist movement to “improve” the quality of the human population, sits here. The display includes an IQ testing device and a probe designed to measure salivation that both belonged to Robert Yerkes, a Yale psychologist and eugenicist. “The saliva measuring device, he got from (Ivan) Pavlov,” said Kailen Rogers, associate director for exhibitions. The Pavlov famous for his dog conditioning experiment was a eugenicist, she added.
Deeper into the exhibit, the anthropology section opens. This section compares the histories of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia because they parallel each other, Rogers said.
A huge sculptural piece named Eternal Cities by local artist and restauranter Muhammed Hafez dominates one wall. The piece features tiny, 3D printed replicas of various artifacts from the Yale Babylonian collection on display in this section tucked into a layered, lived-in cityscape made of architecture from different cultures and eras.
“He built a cityscape reminiscent of Damascus … it has layers and layers of cities across millennia and is lived-in” said Rogers. “You see a nod to contemporary destruction in the centerpiece but ultimately it’s a story of hope … he devises a tribute to those cultures and places.”
The tour capped off with a brief visit to America with Olmec, Inca and other pre-European contact objects. A massive reconstruction of an Olmec head overlooks a gallery featuring a cloth made of thousands of yellow and blue feathers.
North American indigenous art and artifacts will also be displayed in several galleries, but those are not yet ready. Yale, as part of its commitment to following the updated regulations from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, will be displaying objects once they have finished the consultation process with American tribal nations.
“We really have to focus on objects where the consultation process fits with the new regs,” said Skelly.
When that section is completed, it will feature a circular meditative, interactive and immersive space that mixes contemporary and ancestral works of Native Americans. Initially the objects on display will be more contemporary. Older, historical objects will be added over time. Skelly mentioned working with a Texas tribe so that a meteorite, regarded as a sacred object, would be displayed respectfully.
“They told us, no we want it on display, but we want it on display in a culturally responsive way,” said Skelly. “There’s specific bureaucratic steps you have to take … It won’t be on display when we start but we’re not retreating from any of that.”