Peabody Museum of Natural History

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Peabody Museum building

The Peabody Museum of Natural History , informally also Yale Peabody Museum (abbreviated to YPM), is a natural history museum of Yale University in New Haven (170 Whitney Avenue) in the US state of Connecticut . The museum has a long tradition as a research institute in the field of paleontology .

History and ladder

The first Peabody Museum on a postcard (1909)

The museum was founded in 1866 on the basis of a donation from the banker and philanthropist George Peabody (1795–1869) and opened to the public in 1876. The already existing collections of Yale University, some of which go back to the 18th century, were integrated.

The facility's first director was the paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh , a nephew of Peabodys. Marsh, who collected dinosaur fossils in particular, became professor of palaeontology at Yale in 1866 and thus held the first such chair in the USA. In addition to him, George Jarvis Brush (mineralogy) and Addison Emery Verrill (zoology) were curators of the museum.

From 1917 to 1924 the museum was temporarily closed as it had to make way for a new residential building for students and moved.

The current director is David Skelly.

Collections

In the dinosaur hall (Great Hall), which opened in 1925, you can see the skeleton of an Apatosaurus , which still comes from Marsh's collection and was assembled in 1931, as well as that of a Deinonychus . A separate exhibition is devoted to the history of human development ( The riddle of human origin ). There are exhibits and dioramas on Connecticut's native wildlife, including a Birds of Connecticut hall with 722 specimens from 300 bird species. The museum also has an extensive mineral collection that goes back to Yale professor Benjamin Silliman .

It also has an ethnological collection on the subject of North American Indians and an Egyptological collection.

In 1959 the Bingham Laboratory was opened and in 1963 the Kline Geology Laboratory. The museum also has a research station on Long Island Sound .

Zallinger frescoes

The museum houses the large wall fresco The age of reptiles by Rudolph Franz Zallinger (1919–1995), which is 35 m long and around 5 m high. It was completed in 1947 and shows 350 million years of geological history. The fresco shaped the popular scientific notion of dinosaurs for decades and was also immortalized on a postage stamp. Zallinger received a Pulitzer Fellowship for this. Another wall fresco by Zallinger entitled The age of mammals can be found in the mammal hall.

Others

Another museum donated by Peabody, the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology , is located at Harvard University .

Directors

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ History of the museum on its website
  2. ^ Mission & History - About Us: Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. In: peabody.yale.edu. Retrieved February 22, 2018 .
  3. ^ The Zallinger Murals. In: peabody.yale.edu. February 29, 1980, accessed February 22, 2018 .

Coordinates: 41 ° 18 ′ 56.7 "  N , 72 ° 55 ′ 16.2"  W.