In 1858, William Parker Foulke, a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences—a group of naturalists committed to public education and outreach—was on vacation in the quiet Quaker community of Haddonfield, New Jersey. There, he befriended a local landowner, John Estaugh Hopkins, who showed him some unusually large vertebrae that had been dug up in a clay pit on his property 20 years prior. With Hopkins’s permission, Foulke hired a crew to excavate the old pit. Around 10 feet deeper, the diggers’ shovels clinked against a layer of fossil seashells and large bones. The skeleton unearthed from the pit was, at the time, the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever discovered, although it was unfortunately missing its head (and many other bones.) Ten years later, the dinosaur, Hadrosaurus foulkii, went on display at the what was then called the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia—the first-ever mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world at the first natural history museum in the Americas.
The original mount of Hadrosaurus was not exactly accurate. The creature’s skull was conjecture, as was its upright stance. But it drew throngs of crowds to the Philadelphia museum, so much so that they began charging an admission fee. It was the first time people could stand next to a dinosaur, an ancient, almost unimaginable creature with no resemblance to any living thing they’d seen. In 1876, the 10 million people who flocked to Philadelphia to celebrate the 100th birthday of the United States got to walk in the shadow of Hadrosaurus. For 15 years, the Hadrosaurus—nicknamed Haddy—was the only dinosaur skeleton on display anywhere in the world. (It lost this superlative when Iguanadons dug up from a Belgian coal mine were displayed in Brussels in 1883.)
Although the mount was eventually disassembled, the bones remained at the museum, which was renamed the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in 2011 when it became affiliated with the local university. In the summer of 2025, a restored and updated mount of Haddy went back on view at the Academy after half a decade in storage.
On Sept. 1, Drexel and the Academy announced plans to permanently close the museum at the end of the month. The museum, which opened in 1828, had almost made it to its bicentennial.
To museum-goers, this news does not come as a huge surprise. The institution had money troubles, in part because attendance had dipped, and attendance had dipped in part because the institution had money troubles. In the past year, the museum reduced visiting hours to three days per week, laid off some staff, and cancelled its children’s science camp. The Academy and Drexel merged in 2011 so that the university could provide “substantial financial support to the Academy and [cover] its deficits,” per the Philadelphia Inquirer. The new plan to close the museum was “a difficult decision taken to concentrate resources on the Academy’s enduring scientific assets and research,” according to the statement, prompting the question of what is more important: public access to natural history collections or scientists’ ability to research them? But this is a trick question, or at least a question with no right answer.
As of the Sept. 1 announcement, it remained unclear where the collections will go, and if they will be viewable to the public. The announcement sparked outrage from the public, including people who had visited the museum as children and grown up to pursue science and even work with its collections. “This is actually heartbreaking. This museum is my favorite place in the entire city and inspired me as a child and as an adult,” the ichthyologist Kory Evans posted on Bluesky.
A day after the closure announcement, perhaps moved by public support of the museum, Drexel and the Academy announced their intent to continue their affiliation, as well as the appointment of deputy mayor Patricia Wellenbach as the temporary leader of the Academy, whose president and CEO stepped down, per the Inquirer. Wellenbach will explore possible pathways towards the Academy’s long-term sustainability, according to a statement issued by Drexel and the Academy. Now, the plan appears to be relocating the collections and selling the museum building.
Although the future of the museum and its more than 18 million specimens appears to rest in the hands of Drexel University and the city government, this problem is not unique to the Academy or even Philadelphia. In August, a private collection of 318 fossils excavated from the United Kingdom, which included ichthyosaurs and other sea creatures, was sold to a museum in Abu Dhabi after natural history museums in London and Wales failed to come up with the funding. Natural history collections are often hit with disproportionate funding cuts in times of financial difficulty, per the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. In 2024, Duke University announced plans to close its herbarium, which contains more than 800,000 specimens of fungi, plants, and algae and is one of the largest herbaria in the world. It is a brutal irony that as biodiversity faces enormous threats around the globe, so do the institutions tasked with archiving it, as the natural historian Rajith Dissanayake wrote in Mongabay.
Of course natural history collections are difficult to maintain. They require immense space to be housed, let alone displayed. They are always decaying, and as such require the expertise and time of conservators as well as the technology of preservation. These are huge requirements, of place and labor and tools. But it should not be up to these museums to monetize their collections in order to justify their existence.
A natural history museum is many things. It is a trove of materials for modern research. It is a form of entertainment and inspiration for the public, scientists and non-scientists alike. Perhaps most poignantly, it is a record of what life was once like on Earth, a record that becomes only more important as we make the planet less and less habitable. Budgets are not our only threat to our collections; climate change is fueling natural disasters that are more likely to ruin these natural archives, such as the 2017 flood that breached the Svalbard Seed Bank in Norway.
Although the Academy’s closure statement cited declining visitorship as a major source of financial stress, the museum was also hit by federal funding cuts in 2025. The Trump administration has taken a slash-and-burn approach to museum funding, with one-third of American museums losing grants or contracts, per a 2025 report from the American Alliance of Museums. Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services have long served as necessary financial scaffolding for museums to remain open. It is no surprise that an administration that stands in staunch critique of science would see no reason to keep science-based museums in operation. And it is not hard to connect the dots between a federal government hell-bent on deprioritizing science and art and a general public losing interest in seeing dinosaurs, which are perhaps the most awe-inspiring parts of our biological heritage.
In a 2019 issue of the British Journal for the History of Science titled “How Collections End,” a group of scholars investigated the torrent of threats facing scientific collections and offered a global perspective, writing: “The rise of neoliberalism, with shrinking government services and the perception of pervasive and ever-increasing security threats, has diverted resources away from the museum sector in many countries.” This is the case in Philadelphia, where a nearly 200-year-old institution can no longer support itself, where the patron it secured in 2011 now needs a patron of its own. “This reduction in state investment reflects a wider, many-sided issue: the once unquestioned assumption that the museum is a universal good no longer holds,” the scholars added.
It is possible that the Academy of Natural Sciences may still find a savior. Two years after the Duke Herbarium announced its impending closure, the university announced the Herbarium would join the collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, making the new collection of 1.7 million specimens the third largest herbarium in the country. Dinosaurs, which are often larger than plants, will have a harder time finding space. Visitors have until Sept. 27 to see Haddy, before the country’s first natural history museum shuts its doors and the nation’s only Hadrosaurus retreats once more to storage, which is both a form of preservation and a kind of loss.