How The U.S.’s Oldest Natural History Museum Might Meet Its End

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.

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