Are natural history museums going extinct?

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA LICHTMAN: Earlier this week, the oldest natural history museum in the country, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, closed its doors to the public. Museum leaders said attendance never came back after COVID, and it’s too expensive to keep the doors open for visitors. There’s also rumors that the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas, may be mothballed soon, according to the local paper, the Hays Post.

What is going on? How can natural history museums stay relevant when there’s a lot of competition for our attention? And what happens to the collections when a museum shuts down? Will the dinosaur bones be going the way of the dinosaurs? Here to talk about it are my guests. Dr. Jason Cryan is the executive director of the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Dr. Barbara Thiers is the former director of the herbarium of the New York Botanical Garden. Thanks to you both for talking to me today.

BARBARA THIERS: Glad to be here.

JASON CRYAN: Thanks, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Jason, you run a museum. Does this news send a shiver down your spine?

JASON CRYAN: It does. And it’s such a troubling and challenging idea to lose these resources from our communities. I think natural history museums and science museums are under challenges that really have not been before seen or felt with the prevalence of these traveling exhibitions of AI and AR-generated experiences. Along with the economy, which is challenging and expensive for people, the competition for discretionary dollars and families is heightened. And so, natural history museums, science museums need to really refocus on being societally relevant, on being engaging, being welcoming, and being community service organizations.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, how is that different from what they were doing before?

JASON CRYAN: Well, I think the traditional view of a natural history museum is rather static, exhibits showing taxidermied animals and habitats from both local and far away.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love the dioramas, though.

JASON CRYAN: [LAUGHS] And a lot of people do. And we all grew up with these dioramas, and they do have a special place in our hearts. But to be totally fair, I think that those are rather anachronistic experiences. And I think that we need to be much more experiential, much more relevant, much more engaging, certainly welcoming to our communities.

BARBARA THIERS: So there’s been a trend to make museums more inclusive, more outreach to the community. It’s been a major focus of the American Alliance for Museums and other organizations. And a tremendous amount has been done, but the problem is always that these programs that one adds to be extra engaging add on to the budget, and they don’t at least immediately reap a reward. They put more pressure on the staff. They put more pressure on resources.

And the problem with museum funding is that it has been going down now for quite a long time. In the course of my career, I saw a continual downturn in the budgets that were available for the work that we do. So at this point, when things are really critical, there’s nothing much to give up. And you could do more, but you have to figure out how to pay for that more because the staff most likely in most museums are already doing more in a week than they are paid for, maybe sometimes 20% more.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, let’s talk about funding. I mean, where does the money come from to keep museums open? And how have those funding streams changed?

JASON CRYAN: So there are many models. And I think that depending on the model, depending on how the museum is associated with the university or the direct government, or whether state or federal or private, 501(c)3, there are many different models. And as Barbara had mentioned, there are some significant changes in many of those revenue streams. Currently, the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, IMLS, a federal institute which traditionally has provided grant funding for organizations such as ours, their budgets have been slashed, and opportunities for funding are fewer and farther between.

BARBARA THIERS: And the problem is that there’s short-term funding, such as grants, which are wonderful. National Science Foundation for Collections support renovation, even for the adoption of orphan collections. I think I had maybe 15 or 20 grants related to that during the course of my career, and the IMLS, too. The problem is that those are grants with a term. They last two to four years, maybe. But finding sustaining funding, funding for operational, for the operational budget, the one that pays the janitors and the preparators and the lights and so forth, is much harder to get.

And private donors, named galleries, and so forth often are a great source of support. But there has been a concern in the private funding world for some time that perhaps the next generation of private funders are looking elsewhere to put their money, not necessarily in the traditional cultural institutions that their parents and grandparents supported.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That the new people in philanthropy don’t want their name on a building at a natural history museum anymore.

BARBARA THIERS: They have other priorities. And I wouldn’t say they’re not doing it, of course, but I don’t think it’s a given that just because a family, for generations, has supported something, the next generation will do so as well.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What about politics? How does that play a role in your funding streams and whether these museums stay open?

BARBARA THIERS: Museums generally have been averse to getting too deeply involved in political issues. It’s as if the issues that they were supporting, which are often about sustainability, about preserving culture, about diversity, conservation of nature, those issues have become political around them. They didn’t used to be considered all that controversial, but now they are.

And I suspect, although I don’t have any direct evidence, that museums are trying to use different words to convey their message, words that are not going to be triggering. And so politics are entering the realm of what we do, although I am quite sure that no responsible natural history museum is turning away from their core mission, which is about preserving the diversity of the planet.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Jason? [LAUGHS]

JASON CRYAN: I agree with Barbara 100%. I think what Barbara just said is entirely correct. We are finding ways to repackage some of the core strengths, some of the fundamental activities that museums do. So we serve K through gray, as some people say, the full lifetime of experience and education. And yet we, in doing so, we can, in current lingos, emphasize the fact that we are teaching valuable workforce skills and helping to prepare the next generation of STEM workers, many of whom have gotten their start in museums and cultural institutions like ours.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Have you lost grant money?

JASON CRYAN: We have. We have. And there was one particular grant that dealt with climate change and public education. And that was an unfortunate circumstance for the investigator who had that grant. But we continued to do the work. And in doing so, we believe that we’re serving society.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I have to take a break, but when we come back, we have to talk about the collections. Are you up for that?

BARBARA THIERS: Got it.

JASON CRYAN: Let’s do that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. Don’t go away.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, Barbara, what happens when a museum closes? I mean, will we see fossils for sale on eBay?

BARBARA THIERS: Well, that would be a horrible outcome. And depending on the state and depending on the funding under which those collections were made, all sorts of things, it could be illegal. It could certainly affect the tax status of the museum if they sell off their artifacts because once you begin to sell things, it could be that then all of your holdings will be considered taxable items. So it has real implications. It’s very unethical to sell museum collections, but I wouldn’t say it couldn’t happen.

What typically happens is that the collections are given elsewhere. There are other museums that may take, if not an entire collection– in the case, say, of Sternberg, perhaps the fossils would go one place, the herpetological collections somewhere else, the fish somewhere else. And in the past, that has been routine.

In fact, that has been a practice that goes back to the earliest days of museums. There were often small museums that maintained a collection, but then when the interested staff left, the collections were given elsewhere. That’s nothing new. And generally, most collections so absorbed have been well cared for and made available for study, just as they would have been originally. When we start talking about collections of the magnitude of the Academy of Natural Sciences with 19 million objects, probably no other museum is prepared space-wise, funding-wise, to take on collections of that magnitude.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Barbara, how hard is it to relocate a collection? What does that even entail?

BARBARA THIERS: Well, it’s never easy, put it that way. My experience was mostly with plant collections, which may be among the easiest because they’re flat and glued to paper sheets, and they can be bundled and put in boxes. It gets far more complicated when you start talking about things like insects, which are very delicate and are pinned in place. And then, of course, huge complications when we start talking about dinosaurs, large collections of specimens preserved in fluids.

So a couple of years ago, I did a little test to see if I could figure out what would be an average cost per specimen for moving. So I went back over 25 years of NSF funding of collection movement. And I found that it’s never less than $1 a specimen. It could range as high as $5 or even $10, depending on the size and scope.

So the numbers get high immediately. There’s the packing of the specimens. There’s the actual transport, there’s the unloading, and then there’s the incorporation, which can take years. And if the specimens have been cataloged electronically, all of those records have to be changed as well. So it’s a very lengthy and painstaking operation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, and then presumably, you can’t just stick them in any storage unit.

BARBARA THIERS: No.

FLORA LICHTMAN: They can’t just go in the basement, like my storage.

JASON CRYAN: Right.

BARBARA THIERS: Hopefully not.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Give me the details of what is involved.

BARBARA THIERS: So you will always have to have a room with climate control and, of course, no leakage. It has to have a very strong floor if you’re going to put a lot of heavy cabinets on it. But older buildings often do not have the floor capacity, so you may need a reinforced floor. You will need to have an air handling system that moves the air quickly out to take dust and insect particles. And you have to have cabinetry that is airtight and that will not allow pests or water, anything else to get in them.

You need to have a security system to make sure that– especially when we’re talking about things that can be sold and to make sure that there isn’t theft. You need the right kind of lighting that will be sufficient for study, but not so much to damage the specimens. There are a million requirements, and it is very expensive to retrofit a space to be adequate for museum collections.

JASON CRYAN: So in addition to all of those factors that Barbara rightly has just described, those are really more for traditional collections and very critical to all of those collections. But more modern methods of preservation, too, are ultra-cold freezers to preserve the genetic material in these specimens and tissues in perpetuity for genetic work, for genomic work. In addition, all of the infrastructure related to digitization and imaging and scanning and making these collections and their data and their images available on these collective global digital interfaces.

These are our resources for global scientific endeavors that impact environmental studies and medical human medicine, and just, really, everything that you can think of. And so these are vital collections that are used. They are growing. They’re preserved to maintain this incredible treasure of information.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In a world where everything can be digitized, and now you have machines that can analyze data more quickly than we ever could, what’s the reason for keeping the paper copy?

JASON CRYAN: Flora, to get to your question, the electronic, the digital aspect of these collections is critical to keeping museums relevant. However, keeping the originals, keeping those authentic objects will always be important because even though a museum worker or a researcher from around the world with an internet access can search through our collections, oftentimes, it’s necessary to go back to the original source and verify and study further.

BARBARA THIERS: Yeah, you can’t get DNA out of a picture. Increasingly, over the years at my time at the New York Botanical Garden, many of the people who came to study were requesting a small amount of money for DNA sequencing. And now, in the plant community and the herbarium community, the new thing is spectral imaging. You can use herbarium specimens to detect all sorts of things about how a plant grew and what traits it had to survive in its habitat. Those are all things that you can’t get from the image, although the image can be useful to help you focus a project like that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Barbara, what do we lose if we lose museums?

BARBARA THIERS: We lose our past. We lose an understanding of the way that our environments have developed, and we also lose a really important clue as to where they’re going. Through our museums, we have a record of past life on Earth. And with the kinds of techniques we have available to us today to analyze the data, we get a very clear picture of where we might be going and what we may lose, or gain, in the future in terms of biodiversity.

JASON CRYAN: We also lose places, critical places where so many of us become inspired. We become engaged with our natural and cultural environment. We become connected to nature. We become connected to others in our community. These are places, I think, where so many people find inspiration, and their innate curiosity is stimulated. These are the future generations of STEM workers, of doctors, of politicians and decision-makers. And if we don’t give them these opportunities to connect with their own world, then we lose so much.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Jason Cryan is the executive director of the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Dr. Barbara Thiers is the former director of the herbarium of the New York Botanical Garden. Thank you both for taking the time to talk to me today.

BARBARA THIERS: You’re welcome. Thank you.

JASON CRYAN: My pleasure, Flora. Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: This episode was produced by Annette Heist. If you liked the show, please rate and review it. It really does help other people find us. And if you’re out there dusting a diorama or deep in the stacks of an herbarium, I just want to say, we see you, and thank you. And thanks for listening. I’m Flora Lichtman.

Copyright © 2026 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/