About Time: Measuring the Natural World

Photos by Andy Melien

We usually measure time with a clock or calendar. What can fossils, plants, meteorites, and animals tell us about the nature and complexity of time? About Time: Measuring the Natural World, the Yale Peabody Museum’s newest temporary exhibition, mines its extensive collections in pursuit of an answer.  

The exhibition will run from October 2, 2026, through August 9, 2027. The press preview will take place Thursday, October 1 at 2 pm.  

“This remarkable exhibition draws on objects from all 10 of the Peabody’s collecting divisions to tell the story of time in the natural world.  We all have a sense of what a second or a year means for us, but for another species and other natural processes they can mean something utterly different,” said Yale Peabody Museum director David Skelly.

The Peabody is home to a collection of meteorites that fell in Pueblito de Allende in Chihuahua, Mexico on February 8, 1969. A selection of these will be on display. 

Over 4,000 pounds of meteorites fell to Earth that day, offering an amazing volume of information. Scientists have dated the white specks found inside the meteorites to over 4.5 billion years ago. Because no older objects from the Solar System have been identified, these specks are used to mark its birth.  

And, yet, the thin black rind covering the meteorites, called the fusion crust, formed over mere seconds as they sped through our atmosphere, forever marking these objects’ appearance on Earth 57 years ago. These specimens offer a profound illustration of deep time juxtaposed against recent memory, and approximation with exactitude.  

Another highlight of the exhibition is an unusual egg fossil that holds clues to a detailed sequence of events across millions of years, starting 50 million years ago with an egg cracking, meandering into geode formation, and ending with a curious 12-year-old girl in the 1930s.  

In addition, About Time will use crinoids, relatives of sea stars and sea urchins, to demonstrate how fossil deposits preserve different kinds of information depending on how they form over time.  

“The age of fossils is almost impossible for us to imagine. But the formation of a fossil happens on a human time scale. The examples here are chosen to illustrate the contrast between the age of fossils and the time involved in their fossilization,” said Derek Briggs, Curator-in-charge, Invertebrate Paleontology. 

To give another example, About Time draws from current Yale research to reveal that, as birds develop within their eggs, they pass through stages where they look like long-extinct dinosaurs including the “raptor” Deinonychus.  

“The instructions for building a dinosaur — in this case a dinosaur arm — have been preserved within the DNA of every bird for hundreds of millions of years and in fact are enacted within the hidden world of the egg. Living things carry our history inside of us. Evolution acts by adding new things onto the old,” said Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, associate curator of Vertebrate Paleontology. 
 
Ginkgo trees exemplify the concept of living fossils, species that have largely gone unchanged over millions of years. Trout-lilies in the Peabody’s botanical collections show how plants respond to environmental changes over time, and how repositories such as the Peabody help us track patterns.  

Crabs collected from Long Island Sound since the mid-1800s show how species living in a single region shift over time. And, finally, periodical cicadas appear every 17 years in swarms large enough to overwhelm predators.  

“Some of the objects in our collections show us a clear picture of a moment millions of years ago, while others reveal patterns unfolding over centuries,” said Kailen Rogers, associate director, exhibitions.  

In addition, Peabody exhibitions staff worked alongside New Haven Public School teachers to provide additional context. For example, they suggested adding pop culture references to give a sense of what was happening in the world at the time.  

“What do Dolly the sheep, sliced bread, and the election of Abraham Lincoln have in common? They all coincide with the emergence of the 17-year cicadas,” Rogers said.  

This exhibition idea formed a few years ago during the design process for the collection galleries in the renovated Peabody.  

“As you move between galleries in the Peabody, you encounter fossils from the oceans from 500 million years ago, while later you may find a 4,000-year-old cookbook. Both can rightly be called ‘ancient,’ but their contexts are very different,” Rogers said.  

About Time continues the museum’s efforts to tell meaningful and complex stories about the world that give us new ways to consider our humanity.