Long before David Skelly became the Frank R. Oastler Professor of Ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and long before he became director of a museum that is considered one of the world’s major repositories of information about the world and the creatures who live on it, he was a little boy, holding onto his mother’s hand as he walked into that very museum.

“I remember walking into the Great Hall as a very young kid and just being blown away by the dinosaurs,” says Skelly, the director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History and a resident of Madison. “I was a budding paleontologist since I was five years old...I would go as often as I could convince my mother to go. Oh, for sure, growing up, I was always very interested in nature. I was always interested in biology. But the museum was where I figured out that bigger questions were attached to my interests, and that careers were attached. It was a big influence on me.”

Skelly, along with the researchers and staff he works with at the Peabody, are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the natural history museum with a major exhibition, Treasures of the Peabody: 150 Years of Exploration & Discovery, that runs through early next year. Rare and noteworthy specimens and artifacts from the collections, the kind that elicit the same kind of “wow” that Skelly felt when he was a kid, will be on view. At the same time, many of these items are, or they are part of scientific collections that serve as, keys to the way we understand the natural world.

“For most folks in the public, you see the exhibition galleries and that’s the museum. But the exhibition galleries are really an extension of where the museum came from, the collections that are the basis for scientific research. The scientific research produces objects that end up in the galleries,” Skelly says. “In the 19th century, when the Peabody was created, natural history museums were a place for scientists, who were trying to unravel the way the world works—past, present, and future. The first exhibition galleries were put together to provide a sense of what they were discovering and it has evolved from there.”

Skelly says the displays in the museum today reflect that same philosophy, of being grounded in important and ongoing scientific research.

A Generous Uncle, A Hardworking Nephew

“The Great Hall is a wonderful example of that...Those fossilized skeletons are literally the ones that gave us our first window into what prehistoric North America looked like,” he says.

In other words, the Peabody isn’t mimicking popular children’s television shows like Dinosaur Train in an effort to connect with kids. Television shows like Dinosaur Train took their cues from the kind of specimens that are part of scientific collections at the Peabody.

Many of those skeletons were collected, in fact, by fossil hunting teams assembled and led by O.C. Marsh, a prominent 19th century paleontologist who was lucky enough to have a wealthy uncle, George Peabody. Marsh was not only educated at Yale with financial help from Peabody, he also persuaded his uncle to found the Museum of Natural History at Yale with a gift of $150,000 in 1866. Marsh was made a professor at Yale that same year, and went on to use his uncle’s fortune to support himself and his wildly successful bone hunting expeditions. Marsh later bequeathed his massive collection to the museum. His uncle clearly made a good investment when it came to Marsh. By the conclusion of his career, Marsh had published more than 300 papers, reports, and books, and named 496 new species, among many other accomplishments, according to a memoir of Marsh published by the National Academy of Sciences.

Artifacts related to both Marsh and Peabody are featured in the 150th exhibit, along with Deinonychus, the raptor discovered in 1969 by John Ostrom, a professor at Yale and curator at the Peabody. This is the discovery “that reestablished the evolutionary connection between birds and dinosaurs first advanced by Marsh,” according to the museum.

“One could argue that Marsh, as much as anybody else, crafted our original conception of prehistoric life. With the discovery of these giant animals from the deep past, all of the sudden it changed the way we thought about this continent. During this time period, the concept of Manifest Destiny is driving people out west, and these huge crazy animals are emerging out of hillsides,” Skelly says.

But the original conception of these animals was that they were slow, ponderous beasts, impressive in size, but “not the sharpest tools in the shed,” Skelly says. “Then John Ostrom, in the 1960s, makes a discovery, also in the western United States, of a small dinosaur, a predator, obviously fast and agile and, based on its body shape, it is believed that it probably attacked much larger prey than itself, and therefore may have been social and hunted in packs. This was a swift, smart kind of thing.”

This discovery contributed to a new understanding of dinosaurs that popular author Michael Crichton found intriguing, and so he interviewed Ostrom. He then decided to make a Velociraptor, a Deinonychus-like creature, “the star of his new book,” Jurassic Park, which served as the basis for the movie and movie series of the same name by Stephen Spielberg and Universal Studios, Skelly says. To celebrate the museum’s role as a catalyst between science and popular culture, Spielberg and Universal Studios have provided one of the models from the original movie that is being displayed as part of the 150th exhibit, Skelly says.

“It’s a scary looking creature, I can tell you,” he says.

A Record of the World

The exhibits on display during the anniversary celebration are drawn from a collection of about 13 million objects. Of those, more than 100,000 are “type specimens” or the single specimen upon which the species is based. At any given time, only about 5,000 objects are displayed.

“You do the math,” Skelly says. “That’s about 0.04 percent. One job of a curator is to decide how and when to add to the exhibitions and change them. There is a huge amount of work to be done, with a great deal of care. There is no one single answer as to why we pick what we do, but what I can tell you is that everything—from the snails to the meteorites—all have helped answer questions about the world.”

One thing that is particularly rewarding to scientists, is that objects collected long ago for one reason, can be used for different reasons, in the future, by different kinds of scientists, Skelly says.

“One way to think about the collections is that they are repositories of natural and cultural objects that provide this record of the world at different times and different places, that can be used synergistically with collections all over the world to think about any question you have about the world,” Skelly says.

“One set of questions that is something we read about quite often now is climate change. Right? Well, one of the ways we know about climate change and its influences is to examine how climate has changed in the deep past, and how the living world responded to that. Museums like the Peabody have the objects that provide that understanding of how things have changed due to climate,” he says. “So isotopes of different elements can help you dive into the past history of temperature. You can do a chemical analysis. And you can simultaneously look at who was living where and when. In Wyoming 50 million years ago, there were crocodiles and palm trees, meaning that it was a much warmer and wetter place than it is today. And then they were not there anymore.”

Crocodiles and palm trees? In Wyoming?

“No, I am not making that up,” Skelly says. “And that’s what these objects can reveal. Wonderful stories about how radically the world has shifted over time.”

Skelly says he loves working at a place like the Peabody where “curiosity is not just satisfied, it is stimulated.”

“Coming here prompts you to think about new things. And it all happens much more seamlessly than you might imagine. Almost everyone working here at one point was one of those little kids coming through the door. That’s where the big people in museums come from. We totally get how important it is for children to have their curiosity nourished. That is what a museum is really about, being a place where being curious is not just OK, but where [curiosity is] what it’s all about.”

To find out more, visit peabody.yale.edu. Treasures of the Peabody: 150 Years of Exploration & Discovery is on view through Jan. 8, 2017 at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History at 170 Whitney Avenue, at the corner of Sachem Street, one block north of Trumbull Street, in New Haven.The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Check the musuem website for holiday hours. There is an admission fee but it is pay-as-you-wish on Thursday afternoons from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. from September through June. And many local libraries offer a pass for discounted admission. For more information, visit peabody.yale.edu/visit/visit-free.