The Peabody Museum, Yale

We always look for museums wherever we travel, and we really really really look forward to museums with rocks and fossils, so when my brother and his wife suggested we could visit the Peabody Museum we had to go.
Arriving at Yale we parked next to the museum and fed money into the parking meter. The old stately buildings looked fitting for such a storied place and the front of the museum was beautifully carved stone, what could be more fitting.

Our niece Ltjg Louise treated us and her parents to the admission tickets and we hurried upstairs to the minerals display. but before we reached the third floor the meteorites stopped me in my tracks. There were large meteorites from Canyon Diablo and The Red River Fall and of course I had to have models for scale of the two out of this world stones. To see the actual stones and touch them was a thrill as they are in just about every meteor book.
The minerals called and I hurried to the third floor and stopped as I reached the first display of diamonds in the rough. Having hunted Wyoming diamonds for the past two summers, and not finding any, I stared at the stones refreshing myself and my mind with the image of a rough stones, how I someday hope to find a double pyramid shaped specimen!
Th opal display showed all the fire one could expect and there were even tiger eye slabs, polished and shimmering with their chaytoyancy. I looked at the stunning specimens and realized how some of our specimens were of the same quality, its all in the cut after all.
The Egyptian room was fascinating and I wonder what my sister in law Mona felt as she gazed at the plunder of tomb robbers. Probably about the same as I did as we later strolled along dinosaur displays many collected/robbed from Wyoming. Dinosaurs from Wyoming need to stay in Wyoming!
We enjoyed the Native American display,(Hmmm no case filled with Germino's bones), where we both marveled at the bead work and the ivory carvings and I felt my need to carve jade growing stronger as new projects materialized in  my mind.

Stuffed birds, (my brother appreciated the humor in the image of him next to the dodo bird), and mammals, of course students attempting to draw specimens, and other museum visitors all seemed to blend into the experience. Of course a gift shop was at the end of the museum and I was a little disappointed to see the usual artificially dyed Brazilian agate slices.
Now the Peabody Museum isn't the best one we have visited and certainly not the biggest but it does have nice displays and is well worth visiting. Of course its simply the tip of the iceberg of fossils and specimens stored in the back rooms.It was still well worth the visit to walk the floors and enjoy the stories written in stone and bone. Clear skies.

Note big isn't necessarily best. If you want to see a great mineral display be sure to visit the Geology Museum in Rapid City South Dakota and for one of the best dinosaur display go to Thermopolis and its dinosaur Center. There they have an actual archeopteryx fossil found in Wyoming and quite simply priceless, the one at the Peabody is a cast.