DINOS TO BE DISMANTLED The Great Dinosaur Hall at Yale Peabody will be the first to close in a major three-year renovation
The age of the dinosaurs in New Haven is coming to an end … for a while anyway. Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is closing its popular Great Hall of Dinosaurs at the end of the day on Dec. 31 as part of a three-year, $200 million renovation of the museum.
The dinos, which have delighted and educated generations of Connecticut families, won’t roar again in the Elm City until late 2023.
The closure of the dinosaur gallery — as well as the Hall of Mammalian Evolution on the same day — is the first phase in a museum-wide closure to allow for the most extensive renovation in the Peabody history, which is being funded by donations. All the other halls in the museum will close on June 30, 2020, and will stay closed for three years, until construction and re-installation is complete. The largest single donation is $160 million from Ed Bass (Yale class of 1967), a financier who lives in Fort Worth, Texas.
The two fossil halls are closing first because dismantling prehistoric skeletons is delicate work.
“It takes a great amount of time to take dinosaurs apart and put them together again,” says Chris Norris, the Peabody’s director of public programs and a vertebrate paleontologist. “Very few people in the world know how to do it right.
“We’re going to take the dinosaurs to a place in Canada where they will be cleaned and stabilized. They’re getting a facelift for the 21st century.”
One opportunity for those who want to see the skeleton of Yale’s famous brontosaurus — as well as a stegosaurus, ichthyosaur, mosasaur, plesiosaur, mastodon, glyptodon, saber-tooth cat, dire wolf and other long-lost creatures — before their dismantling is at a free ceremony on Dec. 7,