I’m not sure how a museum holding actual plants gathered by Lewis and Clark in 1806 ends up on the chopping block, but it’s 2026, and here we are.
Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences — the oldest natural history museum in the entire United States, founded in 1812 and open to the public since 1828 — is closing its doors for good on September 30. If you’ve ever taken a kid to gawk at its towering T. rex skeleton, this Sunday, September 27, is your last chance.
Beyond the dinosaurs, there’s a lot to say goodbye to. Dinosaur Hall alone holds more than 30 species, headlined by a 42-foot, 7.5-ton T. rex, plus fossils, dinosaur eggs, and footprints. There’s also a live tropical butterfly garden, wilderness dioramas that blend art and science, and a hands-on discovery space where younger visitors get to interact with live animals.
The reason for the closure is the usual one: money. Visitation never fully recovered after COVID, and the museum had already cut back to a three-day-a-week schedule. Drexel University, which absorbed the Academy in a 2011 merger and “manages” its endowment, says closing the museum protects the collections and lets it “concentrate resources on the Academy’s enduring scientific assets and research.”
And those assets are genuinely wild. Tucked inside the Academy’s herbarium are more than 220 actual plant specimens collected by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their 1804-1806 expedition — pressed, taped, and stored since the 1890s, after nearly 80 forgotten years in an attic at the American Philosophical Society. We’re talking wild rice, tobacco, and other firsts for Western science, still in the building. (I’m a Lewis and Clark nut, so this is pretty devastating.) The collection isn’t being tossed out, of course. The museum around it is just closing to folks like you and me.
Flag of football team Philadelphia Eagles between the columns of Philadelphia Art Museum.
(Olga Kaya via Getty Images)But Philadelphians are fighting
Philadelphians are not taking this quietly. City Council members rallied at City Hall this month and introduced a resolution — with subpoena power — to investigate how the decision got made, saying the Academy never even asked the city for help before announcing the closure (I don’t know about you, but I smell something fishy). Council members are floating multiple rescue options: tapping the institution’s endowment through Orphans’ Court (isn’t this exactly what the endowment is for?), emergency state funding, municipal bonds, or historic-preservation tax credits. Philadelphia’s done this before — in 2006, the city raised $68 million in 45 days to keep an Eakins painting from leaving town.
Whether that kind of momentum can save an entire museum rather than a single painting is the question. For now, the dinosaurs — and the 220-year-old plants that outlasted an attic, a forgotten decade, and two centuries of Philadelphia history — have until Sunday. And I don’t know about you, but my heart breaks a little. Seeing such a concrete example of science and knowledge fall by the wayside is a little too much for the current moment.
Hopefully, a miracle of brotherly love can save this wonderful place.
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