Go the way of the dinosaurs

It’s one of the many places I guess I’d just assumed would always be there.

But the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University is not the first museum in Philadelphia to close in the past decade.

In 2018, it was the Atwater Kent Museum. It housed a collection that told over 300 years of the city’s history: everything from a 1682 Lenni Lenape belt to Joe Frazier’s boxing gloves. Its closing was followed by the Neon Museum (2022), the Insectarium & Butterfly Pavilion (2023), and the Art Alliance (2024).

Sure, I know nothing lasts forever and cities change as time marches on. A favorite restaurant, bookstore, movie theater, the beautiful old home you walked past in your neighborhood. Suddenly one day they disappeared behind a construction fence.

But it was surprising when the Academy closed last weekend after 198 years of being open to the public.

A dinosaur-costumed visitor passes behind the T-rex in Dinosaur Hall on Sunday, Sept. 28, the last day the museum was open to the public.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Like everyone else who in the past few weeks has shared their memories on social media, in interviews with reporters or in conversations with others in parents groups or on the playground, I found myself thinking not only about the dinosaur skeletons but also about the feelings and sense of wonder I had experienced there.

I didn’t grow up here, so I don’t have any of the childhood memories many Philadelphians do, but I did visit often for fun as a young adult, with my own children and even as a grandparent. I also photographed many memorable stories there as a visual journalist.

Science educator Buddy Muhler shows visitors the eyeball of a cow, during a talk on the Academy’s closing day.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

One of my favorites was a project I did for the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 2004. I made four trips out west logging thousands of miles on rental cars, seeing all the places I read about in history class. Those stories all start out west, where the explorers paddled up the Missouri River in 1804 to see the Louisiana Purchase and find an easy water route to the Pacific Ocean.

But it was in Philadelphia where it all started.

The westward view from inside Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia. Jefferson had one of the best libraries in the new world there and Meriwether Lewis began his crash courses in scientific education while visiting.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

The American Bison is the largest land animal in North America. Mature bulls can easily weigh up to a ton, yet can still out-run a horse, turn on a dime, and jump a six foot fence. Lewis and Clark described endless herds of these buffalo charging across the vast prairie. Today there are about 300,000 – some in a handful of parks, like this one in T. Roosevelt National Park, but most are in private herds.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Arikara Indian Shannon Fox wears a buffalo headdress for a powwow on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation, North Dakota. Tribes are stressing their role in the success of the expedition. Amy Mossett, a Mandan-Hidatsa from Ft. Berthold and co-chair of the Circle of Tribal Advisors for the bicentennial, says: “In the past, most Americans believed that Lewis and Clark succeeded on their own in the monumental mission, when in fact they wouldn’t have survived without the tribes.”Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Vacationing with his family, seven year-old Bret Farrell of Roselle, Illinois, reaches for “The World’s Largest Buffalo” statue in Jamestown, North Dakota. The wilderness Lewis and Clark saw when they opened the American West to exploration and settlement remains intact in places, but great herds of bison no longer roam the prairiesTom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Tourists at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washburn, North Dakota watch a short Ken Burns video on the expedition. Many tribes take pride in their contributions and welcome a chance to tell their side of the story. On the screen is Mandan Chief Mato-Tope “Four Bears” who lived near where the museum now sits. After the west was opened to Europeans, the great chief died from small pox, as did more than eighty percent of the Mandan population in only a few months. Today there are no longer any full-blooded Mandan, but there is a 4 Bears Casino and Lodge on the reservation.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Though it was named the Corps of Discovery, its members didn’t discover anything that Indians didn’t already know. But Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did identify 178 plants and 122 animals new to science, including this “Grizzly” greeting passengers arriving at the Missoula, Montana airport. After the explorers had some near deadly run-ins with grizzlies, Lewis wrote that “the curiosity of our men with respect to this animal is pretty much satisfied.” Fewer than 1,000 of the bears remain in the Lower 48 States.
Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Frank Muhly is founder of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation and has campaigned for inclusion of Eastern states on the Trail. “In the West,” Muhly says, “no one can say precisely where Lewis and Clark stood. But in Philadelphia, it is possible to walk the very same streets Meriwether Lewis would have walked 200 years earlier.” Sitting in a diner near Independence Hall, his eyes teared-up as he reminisced about his first trip on the Trail, camping with his wife and daughter.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Eleven-year-old Jonathan Smith plays with his skateboard on an empty street in downtown New Town, North Dakota. He is half Hidatsa Indian and lives nearby in the town of Four Bears on the Ft. Berthold Reservation.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Visitors and participants gather during a powwow on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. The National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, in an effort to avoid mistakes made during the 500th anniversary celebration of the arrival of Christopher Columbus, unanimously affirmed tribal involvement as its “number-one priority.”Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Inside his truck in sub-zero temperatures, Klancey Lone Fight herds cattle near Mandaree, North Dakota. Lone Fight is a descendant of White Coyote, the Mandan Indian leader who returned to Washington with the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806. He was a guest of President Thomas Jefferson at the White House for the New Years Ball, and didn’t return to his people until 1809.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

When Lewis and Clark arrived in St. Louis in 1804, the city was a French outpost of about 1,100 souls. The Gateway Arch commemorates their expedition, which turned the town into a base for westward expansion. Of course, St. Louis is well known to many people today for a more contemporary product. Every Fourth of July the city hosts an air show.
Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

A shad leaps from a Mississippi River diversion channel near the mouth of the Missouri River close by St. Louis, in the vicinity where the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1803-04. During their time in the camp one of the men caught a 125-pound catfish in the Mississippi and recorded its length as 4 feet, 3.25 inches long with a mouth 10 inches wide.
Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Some of the greatest changes in the West since the Lewis and Clark expedition have been its rivers. Indians lined the banks of the Columbia to watch these foolish men in dugout canoes struggle on the rapids. In the Dakotas the wild-running Missouri River has disappeared under five of the world’s largest dams. Ice fishing in February means huts, trucks, dogs and hardy folk on Lake Sakakawea (the official spelling in North Dakota) near where during the winter of 1804-05 the explorers stayed with Mandan and Hidatsa Indians and first met Sacagawea.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

By the time Lewis and Clark made it to the 249-foot Latourell Falls in the Columbia Gorge in Oregon in the fall of 1805, they weren’t stopping to look at the scenery. They had been surprised by the vastness and ruggedness of the terrain in the West, dashing hopes of an easy water passage to the Pacific. Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Dusty Skivka fixes a flat on US Hwy 12 outside of Lolo while on a 19-mile ride. Skivka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Montana, rides his bike almost every day and would have probably fit in well with the Corps of Discovery. Lewis & Clark handpicked all 33 permanent members of their crew from Army posts they stopped at during the trip from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi River. Men were chosen for their frontier, hunting, and watercraft skills. Their bodies were strong, efficient, and hardworking, requiring up to nine pounds of meat each day.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

There were no outhouses dotting the landscape during the trek 200 years ago like this one along US hwy 83 near Blunt, South Dakota. The Corps carried plenty of “Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills,” also known as “thunderclappers,” which Lewis had purchased in Philadelphia. They contained a mercury compound mixed with a powerful laxative. Archaeologists have identified one of Lewis and Clark’s old campsites, just east of the Lolo Pass in Montana, by the high levels of mercury at the possible location of their latrines.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Things change as you travel America from east to west. Like calling a carbonated drink soda or pop, or a paper grocery container a bag or a sack, at some point graffiti begins to disappear from roadside signs only to be replaced by bullet holes. This sign along the Yellowstone River near Billings, Montana, is close to where William Clark carved his initials on a butte in 1806 at Pompey’s Pillar, the only remaining physical evidence of their expedition along the actual route.
Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

A neon sign on a pawnshop in Hamilton, Montana shares the night with a full moon east of the Bitterroot Range where Lewis and Clark first encountered the Nez Perce. “Nuun wisiix kii weetespeme” (We are of this land), they say. Theirs was just one of many homelands Lewis and Clark “discovered” on their way to the Pacific. Indian elders tell stories of ancient ancestors reaching back over thousands of moons, so the few hundred years since the arrival of Europeans is only a brief chapter in the story of native peoples. Still, the opening of the West to pioneers and the U.S. Army brought disaster to the Indians in the form of diseases and war.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

A twist on a familiar saying is found on a motel sign in Dillon, Montana, not far from the Idaho border and Lemhi Pass. The National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial estimates that 25 million travelers will camp/drive/bike/paddle/ride/walk — and sleep — across the western trail over the four years of the expedition’s anniversary.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Poles at Big Hole National Battlefield near Wisdom, Mont., mark the locations of tepees of the Nez Perce who, under Chief Joseph, died in an 1877 battle with U.S. troops. A visitor has left a feather out of respect. Decades before the battle, the tribe had helped Lewis and Clark when they got lost in the Bitterroot Range.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Richie No Heart, 7, watches smoke rise through a hole in the roof of a replica Mandan lodge in the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site near Stanton, N.D. His grandmother Dee Joyce Kittson was teaching a quilling workshop at the site. Lewis and Clark sent Thomas Jefferson tobacco pouches decorated with porcupine quills, like those Kittson makes.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Bob Daniel, 73, of Anaheim, Calif., fishes for rainbow trout above the Toston Dam near the Missouri River headwaters in southwestern Montana. In 1805, reaching the headwaters thrilled Lewis; he said traveling up the river had been “toilsome.”Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

The prairie dog was among scores of animal discoveries for the explorers, who sent one to President Jefferson in Washington. It was later displayed in artist Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum on the second floor of Independence Hall.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Along one of the most remote stretches on the Lewis and Clark Trail, the Lochsa River in Idaho, is where Ryan’s Wilderness Inn offers rooms with a television that receives “One Station Only” – but has restrooms that are “sanitized for your protection.” 200 years ago Clark wrote the “road” was “Excessively bad & Thickly Strowed with falling timber….Steep & Stoney.” Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Far from highways and accessible only by canoe, a 150 mile stretch along northern Montana’s Missouri River Breaks is virtually unchanged since Lewis wrote in his journal on May 31, 1805: “As we passed on it seemed as if those seens of visionary enchantment woud never have and (an) end; for here it is too that nature presents to the view of the traveler vast ranges of walls of tolerable workmanship, so perfect indeed are those walls that I should have thought that nature had attempted here to rival the human art of masonry had I not recollected that she had first began her work.”Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

When Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1801, he picked a U.S. Army captain, Meriwether Lewis to pursue his dream of a scientific exploration of the unmapped West. To prepare for the journey Jefferson sent him to the intellectual, medical, scientific and trading center of the new United States: Philadelphia. Here, he spent a month in the spring of 1803 gaining specialized training and purchasing supplies for the expedition.

Flash forward a few years, and among the 122 animals they “discovered” were 178 plants that were “new” to science (Western science anyway — of course Native Americans already knew about everything the explorers found).

A few horns are all that still exist from the animal specimens Lewis and Clark collected for Jefferson. But almost all of those plant specimens survived to this day, and nearly all of them are now housed at the Academy.

Close up detail of labels and mounted dried specimen of Berberis aquifolium, the Oregon grape, collected by Lewis and Clark on Feb. 12, 1806 near present-day Astoria, Oregon.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

In 1938 a taxidermied Western lowland gorilla from what is now the Central African Republic was sealed behind glass in a diorama — and was not touched by human hands for decades. In 2018 workers opened the case and the Academy allowed me to go behind-the-scenes as it embarked on the monthslong historic renovation of their dioramas.

Workers use different wavelength lighting to find imperfections and repairs in the gorillas before they are removed from the Academy in 2018. TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer

During the days of COVID-19, I photographed Stephanie Gleit a designer at the Academy who created interesting social distancing signage for their public spaces. “Maintain 6 feet between your herd and others,” said one of the signs.

I spent an early morning in 2013 as 40-foot-long animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex was installed on the sidewalk outside the Academy’s front door. It was part of an exhibit that featured more than a dozen realistic, animatronic full-bodied dinosaurs, as well as skeletons, fossil casts of skulls, claws and horns, real specimens of mosasaur and spinosaurus teeth, an Oviraptor egg, and the ever-popular coprolite (dino poop).

I was judicious when deciding the very few newspaper assignments I would take one of my kids on. I tried never to take advantage or exploit my position at the newspaper, and I was always concerned with their safety as well as that of the subjects of our story. I worried about the ethics and appropriateness and what the impact might be with their presence. But there were a few times I had to ask — my editors and the subjects — if it would be okay.

Among the 28,000 or so species of orthoptera (jumping insects) at the Academy are these leaf mimicking mantids are from Africa, photographed in 1999;Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

One of those was a time I got to go ”backstage” in one of the world’s largest repositories of natural specimens: bird carcasses, fish, mollusks, minerals, bones … and bugs. My son’s favorite animals. My day as “Cool Dad.”

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: