Behind-the-scenes at the Yale Peabody Museum

Tim White, Director of Collections & Research at the Yale Peabody Museum, and his staff open up the vaults to give viewers a rare look at some of the artifacts and specimens – from Swallowtail butterflies to Apatosaurus femurs to Moche pottery  – that most museum visitors never get to see.

Less than 1% of the museum’s collections are publicly displayed at any one time, the by-product of over a century of collecting and incremental renovation:

“The museum's collection had expanded from the basement below the public exhibits, to other Yale New Haven buildings, to Yale's West Campus. The collection included a wide range of research material collected from around the world. In biological taxonomy, every new genus and species was associated with a defining "type specimen," and thousands of type specimens resided in the Peabody's collection rooms. The museum's collections included type specimens of plant materials and vertebrate and invertebrate animals. In addition to biological objects, the collection included anthropological items from as close as Connecticut and as far away as the South Sea Islands.”