| Activity | In 1866 the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University was founded with a gift of $150,000 for the construction of a museum building and the care and increase of the museum and its collections.
O.C. Marsh was appointed Professor of Paleontology at Yale in 1866, the first such professorship in the United States, and only the second in the world. In addition to serving as director of the Peabody Museum, Marsh, with George Jarvis Brush (Mineralogy) and Addison Emery Verrill (Zoology), was also one of the Peabody Museum’s first three curators. Using his inheritance from his uncle, George Peabody who died in 1869, Marsh proceeded to amass large collections vertebrate skeletons, vertebrate and invertebrate fossils, fossil footprints, and archaeological and ethnological artifacts.
The first Peabody Museum building opened to the public in 1876, but its capacity was soon strained by the huge dinosaur bones that Marsh’s collectors were sending in to the rapidly growing collections. In 1917 it was demolished to make way for a major dormitory complex, the Harkness Quadrangle. Construction of a new building was delayed by World War I, and the collections were in nearly inaccessible storage for seven years, until the current Peabody Museum building became ready for occupancy in 1924.
Dedicated in December 1925, the new building’s two-story Great Hall was specifically designed to accommodate some of O.C. Marsh’s dinosaurs, such the mounting of the giant “Brontosaurus” (Apatosaurus), completed in 1931 after six years of labor
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