Earth Day at the Peabody

The Peabody's signature Torosaurus latus

In an auspicious alignment of the planets type of event, we ended up at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History during Earth Day. We'd just visited the exhaustingly exhaustive American Museum of Natural History just three days prior. The AMNH is one of our favorite museums, one that we almost always see on our visits to Manhattan. However, the very scale of its space and collections can be overwhelming, especially to the smaller set. The Peabody turned out to be a perfectly sized experience for our crew.

For Earth Day festivities, local civic and conservation organizations set up booths in the Peabody's Great Hall of Dinosaurs. Children could collect tomato seeds and small trees to plant at home, see bees working in a comb, and peer through a microscope at a Hemlock woolly adelgid-infested branch. All around them were skeletons and fossils from the Peabody's renowned paleontology collection.





Among other special exhibitions, the Peabody's "A Diorama Takes Shape" allows visitors to experience what normally takes place behind the scenes. As part of the exhibit, Michael Anderson, the Peabody's Exhibit Preparator, and volunteers create plants and other elements for a diorama. Mr. Anderson was present this afternoon, and he cheerfully answered questions from any visitors curious about the process of meticulously creating life-like plants and other elements.


Michael Anderson at work in the exhibition, "A Diorama Takes Shape"

We all left the museum chattering about the insects, fossils, and other artifacts we'd seen. A great stop on our Spring Break East Coast Swing.