The oldest natural history museum in the country is about to close to the public.

Hey, everyone.

Sometimes, something happens in the world outside of science fiction that’s too important to ignore. Sadly, this month, it is the impending closure of Philly’s 200-year-old natural history museum. It felt necessary to take a break from sea monsters and aliens to talk about this museum—why it matters to me personally, as a mom of two young kids, and why its loss will ripple across the scientific community.

Of course, we’ll end with some action steps you can take to help safeguard the future of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and other imperiled museums around the country. This fight isn’t over—it is just beginning.

— Maddie

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It was a picture-perfect Saturday morning in early September—the sort of cool, cloudless day that parents with small kids relish, because we can spend them at playgrounds and parks rather than cooped up inside, waiting for somebody to draw on a wall or smear spaghetti sauce on an iPad.

And yet, the line of adults with strollers waiting outside the accessibility side entrance of the Academy of Natural Sciences—Philadelphia’s beloved natural history museum—snaked around the block.

We all knew the museum would be mobbed. We chose to spend part of this gorgeous Saturday there because we might not have many more chances to do so. Days earlier, the Academy and Drexel University, its academic partner since 2011, announced that the oldest natural history museum in the nation would be closing its doors to the public at the end of the month.

In our household and many others across the region, the news brought shock and grief. So many residents of our city spent cherished childhood days gawking at the T. rex in the dino hall, or marveling at one of the Academy’s dozens of dioramas, which transport visitors to wild places most of us will never step foot in. Although my kids are very young, I’d already seen them light up with wonder touching tortoises and snakes in the museum’s Outside In exhibit, and marvel over the gorillas in the Mammal Hall.

We were developing a rainy weekend routine: Either take the bus to the Franklin Institute to explore its smorgasbord of science exhibits, or head to the Academy to bone up on bones.

That routine may be short-lived. Last year, the state started slashing Philly’s public bus routes. Now, an internationally renowned museum that has sparked countless lifelong passions for science and nature can’t shore up the funds to stay open. In a press release announcing the museum’s closure, Drexel cited rising operational costs plus a long-term decline in attendance following the COVID-19 pandemic. 

It’s hard to believe that a city that just spent $16 million on a July 4th show would be unable to find funds to help cover this museum’s $23 million in yearly expenses.

And yet, that’s apparently what the Academy’s board has concluded, which is why we all showed up on that impossibly beautiful morning. As I waited with my kids for the doors to open at 10, a group of student employees from Drexel placed a large, toothy skull on a table outside. To my untrained eye, it could have been a sabre tooth tiger. We were told it was a giant beaver, Pleistocene vintage. I asked if they’d ever seen a crowd like this waiting to get into the museum. Nobody had.

Once inside, we followed a sea of other families to the tiny elevator to the main dino hall. I immediately regretted bringing the stroller, but I was stuck with my choices, and we waited in line. What felt like an hour later but was probably three minutes, the elevator arrived, and then we were upstairs, grabbing our brushes and gleefully uncovering bones at the Academy’s “Big Dig” for preschool paleontologists.

The Academy is not a large museum. If your childhood experience of natural history museums involved running beneath a life sized replica of a blue whale or traversing a bedazzling, gemstone-filled room, you may find it quaint. But in my sixteen years living in Philly, first as an Earth sciences grad student, then as a journalist, and now as a mom, I’ve come to appreciate that small can be mighty when it comes to science education spaces. Yes, we’ve got the nationally renowned Franklin Institute, where you can walk through a gigantic replica of the human heart, climb aboard an early 20th century steam train, and catch a planetarium show all in a single afternoon. But we also have the Wagner Institute, a Victorian-era collection of taxidermy animals and skeletons tucked away in a quiet North Philly neighborhood, the Mutter Museum, a two-story medical history gallery where visitors can peer into cabinets of meticulously labeled human skulls and preserved body parts, and the Science History Institute, where you can learn about the origins of everything from the periodic table to school lunches.

Like many Philly museums, there’s more to the Academy than a casual visitor might appreciate. While its public displays are the biggest draw, behind closed doors lies a collection of 19 million specimens “representing every aspect of the natural world,” as Robert McCracken Peck, senior fellow emeritus of the Academy of Natural Sciences, recently told the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

That includes over 73,000 type specimens—individual plants, animals, and fungi that serve as a permanent physical reference for the entire species. The Academy also houses one of the world’s largest collections of diatoms, microscopic algae that offer clues about the health of ecosystems and can help scientists track environmental changes. It is home to a globally renowned collection of fishes and the world’s fourth-largest collection of mollusks, meaning that while I just learned the word malacologist, my city is a destination for malacologists the world over. It is also a global destination for scientists studying rotifers (microscopic animals that are also used as environmental indicators) lichens, fungi, and slime molds.

It’s these scientific collections, along with a library containing over 75,000 natural history texts dating back to the 16th century, that the Academy and Drexel now say they are focused on preserving. But their fate remains uncertain, and recent reports suggesting that the Academy’s leadership plans to sell the building and move them have alarmed the natural history community. Many more are dismayed by the impending closure of the public exhibits, which curators say represents a vital part of any natural history museum’s mission.

None of this is a fait accompli. Our recent trip to the Academy didn’t last as long as I might have wanted. It turns out, my two year old prefers a quiet museum experience to the cacophonous crowd we joined that day. But several days later, on another clear, crisp September morning, I found myself back at the Academy’s front steps. A new grassroots organization, Save the Academy, had popped up virtually overnight on social media. Its mission: Stop the museum from closing. This was its first rally.

When I arrived fifteen minutes early, there were a few dozen people milling about. Hundreds more soon joined. There were parents with kids. There were elderly couples. There were people in business attire and others in worn dinosaur t-shirts. People held handmade signs with slogans like “Save our saurs” and “Don’t let education go extinct.” Occasional chants of “Dinos not condos!” swept the crowd.

Squid biologist and science communicator Sarah McAnulty, one of the organizers of the rally, got on stage first. She laid out the stakes: the importance of the museum to our community, the budget hole the Academy needs filled, the attacks on science taking place across the country. Then she handed the mic to a slew of speakers including exhibition developers, science educators, and members of city council. All made their own passionate cases for keeping the museum open. Several, like former Academy entomologist Isa Betancourt and environmental justice advocate Mazzie Aquilla, spoke of their own formative experiences at the museum when they were young. Others described the role the Academy has played in the lives of their kids. Amanda Rabinowitz, an organizer with Philadelphia Science Action, told the crowd that her 12 year old has memories of visiting the museum when he was a toddler. To him, it feels like home.

I left that rally feeling a bit more hopeful for the Academy’s future. So many of us seem ready to fight for this place. And there’s been more cause for optimism since: Last week, after advocates rallied at City Hall, Councilmember at large Nina Ahmad introduced a resolution to hold public hearings on the museum’s financial troubles and discuss how to keep it open. Ahmad herself has already suggested several solutions, including requesting emergency funds from the state, drawing on payouts from the Academy’s endowment to support issuing a bond, and getting the 150-year-old building placed on the city’s register of historical places, which would protect it against demolition and allow it to access special tax credits. 

There is a battle ahead for the Academy, just as there is for science education across the country. But as Rabinowitz pointed out, the stakes are much higher than the fate of some ancient bones. This is about future generations.

“The Academy teaches us to think on a much longer time scale,” Rabinowitz said. “It connects us to the history of the natural world. But for the brief span of a childhood, a great museum can be everything. It can turn a rainy Saturday into a lifelong passion. It can spark curiosity, a sense of belonging, and a commitment to understanding the world. And once those opportunities are lost, they are incredibly difficult to rebuild.

Maddie is a prolific science journalist. She is the former science editor of Gizmodo, founding editor of Earther, and runs The Science of Fiction blog, which explores the real world science behind your favorite fictional monsters, alien planets, galaxies far far away, and more.

@themadstone | maddiestonewriting.com

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