See dinosaurs before they leave the Peabody Museum
Renovation means 3year closing in June
NEW HAVEN — Kids who will miss seeing Brontosaurus looming over them will have even more to marvel at when the Peabody Museum of Natural History reopens after its threeyear renovation.
Brontosaurus will be a much more agilelooking dinosaur, with a longer tail flying behind and its long neck stretched out ahead, rather than standing like a reptilian mountain.
But the Peabody’s main attraction will have new competition. In the new threestory central gallery, where light will stream through a glass ceiling, there will be a dramatic scene overhead, straight from the Cretaceous Period, more than 65 million years ago. Archelon, the 11footlong turtle that was mounted in 1907, will be suspended from the ceiling, chased by a 40footlong Tylosaurus, a crocodilelike reptile. Nicknamed Sophie, the Tylosaurus was acquired in 2014 and has never been displayed.
There will be a lot more to see once the Peabody reopens and it will all be housed in a hightech museum, where student groups will have more space to learn and where the audio guide will follow visitors wherever they happen to go.
The oldest section of the Peabody opened in 1924 “and it’s never really been renovated, so the systems, the structure really needs attention, and the only way to renovate it is to get out,” said Peabody Director David Skelly, who also is a professor of ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
“We’ll be back in after two and it takes a lot of time to reinstall the exhibitions,” he said.
While the skull of Brontosaurus was removed during a celebratory ceremony Saturday, “we’ve been working on this for 18 months,” said Tim White, director of collections and research. Staff members have been packing up the vast majority of the collection that is not on display, most of which will be stored at West Campus.
“We’ve been doing this in a very systematic manner,” White said.
The Great Hall of Dinosaurs will close on Dec. 31, as will the Hall of Mammalian Evolution, so that the massive dinosaurs can be taken apart, bone by bone, and shipped to Research Casting International in Ontario, Canada. The rest of the museum will close June 30, although some of the collection will be available to tours and student groups in the Class of 1954 Environmental Science Center
on Sachem Street and at West Campus.
Between now and the end of the year, Dino December will be celebrated on Saturdays, with special activities for children.
The Canadian company is one of very few in the world with the expertise to remount dinosaurs, said Chris Norris, director of public programs, who oversees how the collection is presented, as well as the ways in which the museum engages with the public. “What they do is they take the bones down from the existing mount, they repair them ... they’ll clean them [and] remount the skeleton,” he said.
Then an armature will be built for the skeleton in its new pose. “It’s a mix of sort of art and engineering and an awful lot of skill,” Norris said.
Carol DeNatale, who is directing the project, said she “played a similar role at the [Yale University] Art Gallery for 17 years.” She is the liaison between Centerbrook Architects and Planners of Essex, Yale’s facilities offices and the Peabody’s staff. “I’m basically the one that connects all the dots,” she said.
The dinosaurs are the headliners at the Peabody, which attracts 150,000 visitors a year, impressing children who look up in awe at Brontosaurus and drawing scientists who come to see specimens that in many cases are the sources of the dinosaurs’ names and descriptions. “We host visiting researchers here [from] throughout the world,” said Vanessa Rhue, who joined the Peabody two months ago as manager of the vertebrate paleontology collections, which include the dinosaurs.
These originals, known as holotypes, were brought back by Yale professor Othniel Charles Marsh and the Yale students who accompanied him on four expeditions to the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.
“If you’re a kid growing up, every kid knows the name Brontosaurus, Triceratops and Stegosaurus and those are all Yale dinosaurs,” White said.
If a paleontologist finds a specimen and wants to know whether it’s a new species, “they have to come and check my dinosaur and check to see if it’s really different or if it’s the same as something else,” Norris said.
From Peabody to Smithsonian
Matthew Carrano was one of those kids. Growing up in Branford, he would visit the Peabody numerous times each year, sometimes having his parents drop him off so he could wander through the Great Hall.
Now 49, Carrano’s lifelong love of dinosaurs led him to his current job as curator of dinosauria at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, which in June reopened its fossil hall after being closed for five years for its own renovation.
Carrano empathizes with those who won’t be able to visit the Peabody’s dinosaurs for three years. “I remember coming to the Smithsonian when I was 11,” he said. It was during the museum’s previous renovation, and the dinosaur exhibit was closed.
“We had no idea until we got here,” he said. “There was a wall with like a hole you could look through and I bought a toy dino … and that was that,” he said.
It was also a time when dinosaur lovers had much less to feed their devotion. “It was before dinosaurs got to be the insane popularity that it is now,” he said. So having the Peabody nearby was really fortunate.
“For a city the size of New Haven, it’s a substantial natural history museum,” Carrano said. “To have this kind of internationalgrade fossil collection is not common.”
At the same time, the Peabody was accessible enough that Carrano could go behind the scenes to see work being conducted, volunteer at the museum during high school and go on a dig before college. “You feel connected and so you get to really appreciate what goes on in a museum,” he said.
While the Smithsonian’s dinosaur hall was closed, a small exhibit was set up because, for many coming to Washington, it may be the only visit they’ll ever make. “If they don’t see our dinosaurs, they may never see our dinosaurs,” he said.
He called the Smithsonian and Yale dinosaur collections “basically sibling exhibits,” both collected largely by O.C. Marsh. And while renovation was needed both to update the exhibits and upgrade the 100yearold museum, Carrano said, “It’s sort of mixed feelings when you do a renovation like this. They’re very old exhibits. You really have to renovate them but you’re closing the door. These are the last of that generation left.”
Like his peers at the Peabody, Carrano was involved in deciding how to “maximize that experience and get that story across,” knowing that most visitors will not see all of the 31,000sqarefoot exhibit. “You start designing around information flow,” he said.