Yale Peabody Museum gets $160 million gift for renovations

The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven.

The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven. Photo: Christian Abraham / Hearst Connecticut Media Buy photo Photo: Christian Abraham / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 27 Caption Close Yale Peabody Museum gets $160 million gift for renovations 1 / 27 Back to Gallery

NEW HAVEN — The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History will undergo a major two-year renovation as the result of a $160 million donation by Edward P. Bass, a billionaire and philanthropist who graduated from Yale University in 1967.

The “gut renovation” will close the 152-year-old museum for two years. When it reopens, its prize brontosaurus fossil will have been remounted in a more natural pose, according to Peabody Director David Skelly.

“It’s going to enable us to expand the visitors’ galleries by 50 percent,” Skelly said Tuesday. There will also be major additions to make it easier for the 25,000 to 30,000 schoolchildren who tour the museum each year to visit, Skelly said. “When we reopen, we’ll have a dedicated K-12 education cener with space for people to get oriented before they go into the galleries,” he said.

The renovation will include new student classrooms, “bringing Yale’s broader teaching mission into the museum,” Skelly said.

“Yale’s reputation for leadership in the sciences is grounded historically in the Peabody Museum, founded 152 years ago,” Bass said in a press release “This renovation and expansion will enhance every aspect of the Peabody, bringing it up to date and preparing it for the future. We will have 50 percent more gallery space, cutting-edge exhibits, and the ability to put the extraordinarily rich collection not only on view for the public, but also in the hands of researchers and students alike.”

One feature that will remain, Skelly said is the 110-by-16-foot mural, “The Age of Reptiles” by Rudolph F. Zallinger, which is mounted on the wall of the Great Hall, where the Peabody’s prize dinosaurs are on display.

The largest fossil, the brontosaurus, “is going to be completely taken apart and shipped to a firm that completely remounts dinosaurs,” Skelly said. “There aren’t too many of those.” The remounting will incorporate discoveries about the appearance and lives of dinosaurs made since the museum opened in 1925 with fossils brought back to Yale by paleontologist O.C. Marsh.

“When the brontosaurus was mounted in the late 1920s, it was one of the first dinosaur mounts anywhere, and to be fair to those folks they were learning as they were going,” Skelly said. The dinosaur’s tail will be longer and “be held up off the ground,” Skelly said.

Bass’ donation is the largest known gift ever made to a natural history museum in the United States, according to a press release.

Bass, 72, is one of four brothers to have gone to Yale (as did their father) and has made major donations to the Peabody and other areas of the university, particularly involving the sciences.

He has a net worth of $2.1 billion, according to Forbes, which said he and his brothers sold their oil company to ExxonMobil in 2017 for $5.6 billion. Bass has invested in the Biosphere 2 closed environment project in Arizona. His donations founded the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies and he has supported the Class of 1954 Environmental Science Center and the Yale Science Building. This year, Bass donated $10 million to create the 500-seat O.C. Marsh Lecture Hall.

In the release, Yale President Peter Salovey said, “I am deeply grateful to Ed Bass for a gift that will transform the Peabody. Imagine an expanded natural history museum where the exhibits reflect the most current science; where faculty members and students can more efficiently use the collections; and where our investigators have spectacular research facilities. This is a magnificent gift.”

edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382.