Kids Ring In iPeabody Era

The reborn Peabody Museum unlocked its doors Tuesday and ushered in a new era of kids ready to roam renovated dinosaur rooms — as the kids unlocked their iPhones.

Sixth graders from Augusta Lewis Troup School were the first New Haven students to tour the museum four years after it closed for a $160 million makeover that increased gallery space by 50 percent and made admission free in perpetuity. Read more about that here.

They filed in just before 10 a.m. Tuesday, high-fiving Director David Skelly and city officials (as well as U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro) along the way. They were joined with elementary students from Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration before members of the general public further flooded the lobby later in the day.

“This is like a once-in-a-lifetime chance!” 10-year-old Derek Silva declared. ​“We gotta take pictures of everything.”

“I never thought I would see dinosaur bones with my own eyes,” he said, whipping out his phone to snap pictures of a 75-foot-long brontosaurus standing next to him. ​“I’ve only seen them in the movies.”

Silva joined his older brother Eli, 12, and their friends Aaron Richardson, 12, and Kenneth Ramirez, 11, in exploring the ​“massive” museum for a mere 60 minutes on Tuesday. Though all hail from New Haven, none had previously visited the Peabody.

They marveled at the size of towering prehistoric skeletons and imagined what colors they were, what kind of foods they ate, and what kind of habitats they lived in.

“Yo, you see the mouth on this?” schoolmate Aaron Richardson pressed his peers upon spotting a saber tooth cat. ​“Look at that jawline, bro!”

“If that thing bited me…” Derek began. ​“You would not even be alive!” his brother, Eli, mourned.

“There’d be no building to protect you!” Richardson agreed.

A Peabody educator named Joanna Romberg overheard the conversation. ​“Did you guys watch Ice Age?” she inquired.

“Yes!” the crew cheered. 

“Well, that’s kind of like a sabre tooth tiger,” she said.

“That used to be a cat! Oh my god! I’d die if I had a pet like that. Imagine, bro!” Richardson reflected.

That news, meanwhile, propelled Derek towards a different revelation: ​“So… every single animal has ancestors?”

So, he continued, ​“people look into this stuff to find out what kind of animal they are.”

Derek had another thought: ​“I would say that it’s like a million dollars for every bone in here.”

Then another: ​“We gotta get pictures of everything.”

Stumbling upon what appeared to be an abstract art piece impressed into concrete, Derek asked, ​“Excuse me, what is this? I don’t see no head.”

Museum Assistant Samantha Murphy stepped in. ​“That’s a fossilized fish. It’s very hard to find a whole fish that’s fossilized.” 

“My question,” Derek followed up, ​“is are the bones more valuable than the print?”

Murphy clarified: Derek was looking directly at a fossil, not a print or replica. The fish’s head was obscured, she said, by something inside its mouth which it was likely eating at the time of its death.

“I’d rather go out with some Pepe’s,” Murphy said. 

The fact that the fossil featured the whole fish plus the fish’s food, Derek rationalized, must mean it was extra valuable.

“It’s definitely rare,” Murphy agreed. 

Next up, a skeleton of a mastodon, a large animal belonging to the same order as elephants and mammoths, caught the kids’ eyes.

“I’m tryna’ get the best angle,” Aaron said, kneeling in front of the display. ​“That’s what we’re all tryna’ do!” 

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Derek started, revving up for another stellar question for Romberg, who tailed the foursome: ​“Was the woolly mammoth the one that made plants?” 

Before a clear answer could be posed, Derek continued: ​“And then my question is, did this help the solar system? Because it would make trees and help out?”

Aaron set the record straight. ​“Well it’s not the solar system. That’s space. But trees help the planet,” he said. And woolly mammoths ate plants, not produced them.

“Ever seen the Lion King?” Romberg pitched in. ​“It’s the circle of life.”

Across from the mammoths were skulls of neanderthals and ancient humans. ​“They just ate squash and beans,” Derek reported. ​“They had no health problems so I bet they lived super long.”

“Not really,” Romberg corrected. 

When Derek didn’t recognize a certain animal, he told his pals: ​“What I can say is that it was probably an ancestor of another animal.”

As other students made their way across the museum’s two floors of exhibits (the third floor will open in late April), Derek’s crew took their time, staring at and taking photos of every single fossil before hitting the next.

At one point, their friend Zaria White approached for a debrief. Her favorite sight, she said, was a taxidermic wolf that looked so genuine that ​“I thought it blinked at me,” she said.

“I’ve seen this stuff on TV but never up close. It looks so realistic.” Asked whether she’d come back to the museum, the young New Havener said: ​“No, I don’t travel — except for school trips.” 

“I don’t wanna leave,” Derek said. ​“This is really fun.”

“I’m learning so much stuff,” he said — way more than he does in the classroom. Though, he added, he loves his school, because they take him on ​“exciting” field trips (including bowling scheduled for Wednesday of this week).

But, he said, ​“I’m scared I’m gonna forget all this.”

“I’m not gonna forget!” Richardson countered. ​“I’ve got this all on my phone. I’m gonna show my mom, my dad, and my meemaw.” 

This reporter reminded them that the museum is now free. Though reservations are booked out through mid-summer, a return to prehistoric times was not beyond the realm of possibility.

According to 8‑year-old Kareina Dedona, who was visiting her grandmother Kailash Patel from Harrison, N.Y., you might not even need a ticket.

“I tried calling the museum so many times and there was no answer,” Patel said. ​“So I said, let’s just go!”

They had no trouble getting inside. With no phone in her hand, Dedona also had her fingers free to stroke a series of fossilized invertebrates, including ancient coral and a 450 million-year-old trilobite.

Turns out those long-dead sea beings, presented by 20-year-old Adira Ahmad-Rizal, were actually curated by more children: New Haven public school teens tasked with choosing their favorites out of millions of fossils. 

Adhmad-Rizal, now a junior at Yale, said she’s interned with the museum for six years through the Evolutions After School Program while a student at Career High School.

During that internship, she said, she actually spent a lot of time churning out social media content — including the video linked above discussing the life of trilobites.

Now a student in evolutionary biology, she said, she’s realized she doesn’t want to spend her life researching: ​“I want to keep doing outreach and museum work,” she said. ​“I want to teach.”