Inside the making of the world’s most modern natural history museum

Dinosaurs are winging in at 550 miles an hour from across the planet: Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, a herd of Triceratops, and a pair of Tyrannosaurus rex (plus a carcass for the tyrannosaurs to do combat over). The museum has them in a queue, along with thousands of other specimens, from a fog-basking beetle to a reconstructed dodo. Some of them are awaiting takeoff, and some are in flight. Others are being uncrated, condition-checked, 3D-scanned, and quickly moved out for reassembly on the museum floor, all to make room for the next specimens just rolling through the delivery bay door.

It’s early November 2025, and there are 20 days left until the opening of the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi (NHMAD), a 377,000-square-foot structure being built and populated on what even the museum’s managers admit is an “insanely short” five-year timeline. With luck, the final major specimen—the last of five 75-foot-tall sauropods greeting visitors at the entrance—will arrive in time to go on display a day or two before the soft opening. That’s when Abu Dhabi’s royal families will arrive, fully expecting to be impressed. At the moment, however, that dinosaur, a Diplodocus, is still in Canada. And the mount is not yet complete. No pressure, though.

The new museum stands on a sandy, low-lying island named Saadiyat, separated by an inlet off the Persian Gulf from metropolitan Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). Nearby in the neighborhood: the Louvre Abu Dhabi, opened in 2017, plus the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and a new national museum, both rushing to completion at the same time as the natural history museum. Much of the rest of the island is also under construction, with high-end hotels and housing for the crowds all these vaunted institutions are expected to attract.

Name brands, celebrated architects, and superlatives clearly matter. Ride a hotel elevator in town and a 30-second film on loop will remind you that Yas Island, Abu Dhabi’s entertainment counterpart to Saadiyat, boasts a Formula One racetrack, the world’s fastest roller coaster (in a Ferrari World theme park), and the “world’s largest indoor skydiving flight chamber.” It’s all part of a well-financed push to transform Abu Dhabi from a sandy desert petrostate into a travel destination and a cultural heavyweight, on a par with Paris and London. Or rather, ahead of Paris and London, if Abu Dhabi achieves its declared goal of attracting 39.3 million visitors a year by 2030, up from 6.6 million in 2025. That doesn’t mean the U.A.E. is backing away from its chief business of gas and oil exports; the opposite, in fact. But the heavy spending to promote tourism and other industries marks a deliberate shift away from dependence on fossil fuels, which now account for just 30 percent of the national economy, down from 85 percent as recently as 2009.

The natural history museum will be the first of its scale in the Middle East. The people planning it mean to acquire “some of the most incredible specimens known to mankind”—like a chunk of the Murchison meteorite containing grains of a universe from before our sun existed, or fossils of a miniature horse that once wandered Abu Dhabi itself. They also want to reveal those specimens in ways that bring the public much closer to the natural world than other globally renowned museums have dared.

Driving that ambition is the man the museum staff refers to as “the chairman,” Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, who heads the Department of Culture and Tourism and various other entities, including the company supervising construction of the museum. He manages to visit almost daily. “He’s everywhere every day,” says a construction manager who has experienced the chairman’s leadership at Yas Island, the Louvre, and other projects. “He doesn’t sleep, I think,” adds a museum administrator.

The changes he makes ripple through the building. Less than three weeks before opening, for instance, he orders the removal of dozens of visitor information stations, on the grounds that they crowd the aisles, can be read only by able-bodied adults, and come between people and the exhibits. The cables that powered them now snake up from the floor to nowhere. They’ll be gone too, before long.

The hope, says Al Mubarak, in English Americanized by his college years in Boston, is that every child who visits will come away thinking, “I gotta do everything in my power to safeguard what’s here right now. Whether it’s the ocean, the deserts, the beautiful trees, I need to safeguard this. I need to safeguard every single species.” The museum, he says, will be a place “to look into a better future for our natural world.”

Maybe one day soon. But right now, 20 days out, time is short, and the Diplodocus isn’t the only thing missing from the museum floor.

The clock for the Abu Dhabi natural history museum started ticking on October 6, 2020, in a Manhattan auction room emptied by the COVID pandemic. When the final lot of the evening, the celebrated Tyrannosaurus rex fossil dubbed Stan, came under the hammer, a 20-minute bidding war ensued, culminating in a winning offer, auction fees and all, of $31.8 million. It was then the highest price ever paid for a dinosaur. Outraged paleontologists worried in news accounts that Stan would be lost to science in some billionaire’s private collection and that museums were being priced out of the market.

In fact, the anonymous buyer was Abu Dhabi. By the inexorable logic of the five-year plan, that start put the opening of the natural history museum sometime in the last quarter of 2025. In Abu Dhabi, as a member of the museum staff later tells me, people often “want things to happen fast, to be high-impact, to make a statement.”

To make it happen, Abu Dhabi turned to the woman who had just completed a major updating of the National Museum of Ireland. Judith McAlester signed on as employee number one in 2021 with the job of choreographing construction, finance, hiring, acquisitions, and whatever else came up—all happening in parallel and compressed into the four years then left to opening day. As project manager, McAlester brought a kind of contagious delight to the making of a new museum, rather than, say, sheer terror. She’s “the beating heart of the museum,” says Phillip Manning, who advised the team from the start in between classes at the University of Manchester before becoming the museum’s full-time science director in 2024. McAlester, Manning notes, is also “a blur” for the speed at which she made the choreography happen.

Money wasn’t an issue for the museum in the ways that are normal in the natural history world. “In Europe, they give you 25 euros and say, ‘Go make an exhibit,’ ” one staff member jokes. “Oh, but there’s overhead, so they take back 40 percent.” Soon after Abu Dhabi’s Stan bid became known, though, fossil dealers began “adding zeros” onto their prices, says McAlester. The museum was being “offered things for insane amounts of money that every other place in the world would be offered for a fraction of the price.”

She was outraged, and “not just about the money here.” By then, the museum team recognized that it shouldn’t be driving up global prices and pricing out other museums. “So, yeah, there’s been a lot of negotiations, hard negotiations, where we’ve—I’ve—fallen out” with dealers for a time, McAlester says. Based on advice from Manning and others well-connected in the fossil world, McAlester began buying directly from people at excavation sites. “They have all of the backstory,” she says.

Buying straight from the dig made due diligence easier. The aim was to avoid the “colonial plunder” at the heart of many past museum collections, as well as specimens with tangled ownership histories. “You want to open right,” says McAlester, “and make sure that the museum is clean and can be a trusted museum in that sense.”

At one point the museum was offered an Archaeopteryx, one of only 14 known specimens of the celebrated Jurassic bird. It was the acquisition of a lifetime—except for the tangled ownership history. “The paperwork was little to nothing, various letters from one German person to another, saying, ‘My friend is …’ la la la,” says McAlester. “We had to say no. It just was too risky for us.” Mention of the Archaeopteryx still brings forlorn yearning to faces around the museum.

Another deal, for a collection of extraordinarily preserved ichthyosaurs, ammonites, and other Jurassic fossils from Holzmaden, in southern Germany, also fell apart on paperwork issues in negotiations with a dealer. (More forlorn faces.) Later, though, it came back on the market being sold by the original owners, “which takes out such a huge layer of problems,” she says. “So it is actually arriving next Monday.” That would be 15 days to opening, with 25 enormous crates coming through the shipping bay door. “That’s a big, big celebration for us, because we thought we’d lost it.”

In September of 2021, Phillip Manning was driving on the M1 to London when an incoming call from a Canadian number lit up his phone screen. “I heard you’re working on a new museum,” the person on the other side of the line said. “Would you be interested in a blue whale?”

A few days before, on September 9, the whale carcass washed ashore on a beach in Sambro Creek, Nova Scotia. It was a young mature female, a significant loss for a species still recovering from the whaling trade. Marine rescue workers could find no evidence of a ship strike, fishing gear entanglement, or other possible cause of death. International law limited use of the whale’s remains, 82 feet long and weighing 60 tons, to educational purposes. Manning and the museum pounced.

Members of the local Mi’kmaq community performed a ceremony to send off the whale’s spirit, and as if they were part of the farewell ritual, two bald eagles flew the length of the whale and away into the sky. Then Research Casting International, or RCI, a designer and installer of specimens for museums worldwide, went to work on the grim business of preparing the bones for museum display. After stripping the bones clean, RCI buried them for over a year in a manure mix that contained dermestid beetles to clean off the remaining organic matter. Then it degreased the bones with a high-pressure wash.

The plan was to ship the whale by commercial air freight from Chicago direct to Abu Dhabi. U.S. officials had given their approval to cross the border, based on permits to comply with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. The bones were strapped down on foam cushioning in 16 crates, sizes XXL and up, and trucks were waiting to carry them down to the airport. But the morning of the delivery, “the guy at [U.S.] customs said no,” McAlester recalls. He wanted one more permit. It would take weeks.

People oceans apart spent the next two days, says McAlester, “going through all the different routes, checking, could we land there? Could we land there?” Hasenkamp, the company that had contracted to make the delivery, found a charter air freight company to come to Toronto for the pickup. On the third day, the whale flew to Abu Dhabi on a private 747, with a refueling stop in Uzbekistan, which would not require an additional permit to transit its territory. McAlester followed it through the night on a flight-tracker app, her third day of “not sleeping from one part of the world to the other,” until the whale’s safe arrival in Abu Dhabi.

The whale still needed to be reassembled on a steel armature and hoisted into place. Unlike the blue whales hanging high at museums in London and New York, the Abu Dhabi specimen would float just overhead, almost close enough to touch, above an exhibit on the community of species that thrive around a “whale fall.” Because the room remained a construction site, another company, aptly named Unusual Rigging, built it a whale-size skybox, climate-controlled and impact safe.

For Manning, caught up in the endless uncertainties of planning a museum at light speed, the whale’s arrival and installation was that moment when “you kind of go, ‘It’s real. This is happening.’”

“It’s a homegrown museum,” he adds, “and that’s actually really important for Abu Dhabi.” It’s the first time a development of this scale on either Saadiyat or Yas Island hasn’t partnered with some global brand like SeaWorld or the Louvre. “This is a big sign saying, Look, Abu Dhabi has the capability internally to not only come up with a vision but to do the design, delivery, fit out exhibitions, and produce something that is, well, class.”

That homegrown ambition goes beyond the public side of the museum. The museum was also working to become a major research center equipped with the most advanced technologies, at a crossroads between Global South and North. The names of these technologies—MALDI TOF, micro XRS, and the like—“all sound like cocktails,” says Manning. But they will enable the museum to add whole new layers of meaning to fossils. For instance, running a synchrotron beam over a fossil “like a typewriter, to and fro,” he says, can reveal the chemicals a dinosaur used to build itself in life versus the ones that seeped in later, as it became a fossil. That means Manning’s job isn’t just to help acquire and exhibit specimens but also to “futureproof them,” ensuring the valuable scientific information contained in them isn’t damaged when they’re being prepared for display.

Apart from Al Mubarak, the museum’s leadership has largely come from abroad. That’s not unusual in a country where 89 percent of the people are expatriates. But NHMAD now has five Emirati assistant curators studying everything from the spiders of the Arabian Peninsula to a 50-foot-long Bryde’s (pronounced BRU-dez) whale skeleton that turned up in a mangrove forest 15 minutes from the museum. “We had 120 volunteers” come to help bring the bones in from the forest, says Noora Albalooshi, an assistant curator with a special interest in marine mammals. “And we had parents come with their kids. It was amazing to just see everyone come together and help support us.” The hope is that Emirati assistant curators will move up as they gain experience and advanced degrees in their specialties.

The museum’s “Arabian lens” on the natural world shows up mainly in exhibits about the wildlife of Abu Dhabi today and in a distant past. Seven million years ago, during a brief, watery interlude in the arid history of the region, a river flowed through a coastal area of western Abu Dhabi. The surrounding forests and grasslands were alive with monkeys, giraffes, hippos, antelope, small three-toed horses called hipparions, and elephant relatives like the four-tusked Stegotetrabelodon.

“You have to imagine sabertooth cats chasing hipparions and chasing the antelopes,” says curator Mark Beech, a longtime paleontologist who worked in the Baynunah formation. “So it really gives us an idea. You can imagine the rivers and then the savanna grasslands getting a bit drier when you get farther away from the river.” It’s a reminder both how rich the Arabian world can be and also how changeable.

The Arabian lens shows up in one other surprising way. “We are now in the sixth mass extinction event, and our climate is rapidly changing because of human activity,” a sign declares at the entrance to an exhibit area titled “Our Future.” In early discussions, says McAlester, design consultants included ways of phrasing the issues that were less stark. “And when we brought it to the highest powers in the U.A.E., they were like, ‘No, we just want you to talk about the science. Don’t try and soften it. This is a science museum, and we want this to be a museum for the 21st century.’ ”

Other displays make the U.A.E. a central part of that story. “The fossil fuels that power our travel have a giant carbon footprint,” one video declares, with transportation emitting billions of tons of greenhouse gases annually. “To address climate change, it’s essential that we steer away from these fossil fuels.” Then it shifts to the U.A.E.’s plan to cut 40 percent of domestic carbon emissions and 56 percent of transport emissions by 2030—the sort of commitment it might arguably achieve, given the country’s penchant for going fast and making statements. The same displays don’t, however, mention the major investment by the U.A.E., now the world’s eighth largest oil producer, to accelerate oil production for export over the next few years. The reality is that museums, in the U.A.E. as elsewhere, can only educate, and only so far. They don’t make government policy, even when built by the government itself.

Six weeks before opening, a contractor installing the museum’s largest dinosaur, a Brachiosaurus, discovers a 15-millimeter discrepancy in the floor under one of the fossil’s two main supporting posts. It’s hardly noticeable, a half inch over a distance of 16 feet. But it’s too much for the dinosaur.

“When you build a mount that’s perfectly balanced,” says Manning, you want “all the load being translated correctly” down to the concrete floor. He uses his water bottle to mimic the positioning of a properly balanced dinosaur mount. “And if you’re out of that load by just 10 millimeters …” He lets go of the bottle, and it smacks down on the table. It’s not a crisis, says Manning. The museum has found a local company to engineer steel plates, leveling up the floor and spreading the load over a larger surface. It’s just a road bump.

Asked about another potential road bump, the no-show Diplodocus for the atrium, Manning becomes lyrical: “The process of excavation, preparation, consolidation, producing blacksmithied mounts, which caress the bone, then grasp it just enough to take the load but not enough to leave an impact … these things take time. You’ve got 300 bones in sauropods. A lot of smithing to do.” He is unworried.

Taking big, calculated risks is built into the culture. It shows up, for instance, in how the museum chooses to display one of its most prized specimens. The celebrated Tyrannosaurus rex  Stan—of the $31.8 million price tag—has become widely known in its original pose from photos and 3D-printed copies exhibited at other museums. He stands with head high, mouth wide, and long, butcher-boy teeth prominent, as if roaring his ravenous appetites at the world.

The Abu Dhabi team has chosen instead to exhibit him in combat with another, slightly smaller tyrannosaur. And Stan appears, at least momentarily, to be losing, head down, mouth partly open as if gasping for breath, and about to be bitten on the neck by his adversary. That pose fits the scientific evidence of combat scars on Stan’s head and neck. It also puts museumgoers eye to eye (and tooth to tooth) with Stan. It’s a stunning transformation.

The pressure to get things done is intense. “Inside we’re all screaming,” one staffer confesses. In places, though, the mood is almost serene. Over in the African savanna biome, a taxidermy specialist kneeling beside an acacia bush holds up a weaver’s nest on a branch, and then a weaver just above it. The zoology curator, Sebastian Kirchhof, stands below, and they trade thoughts on placement as if hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree. “Aardvark coming through,” a colleague warns, wheeling past a model meant for elsewhere in the exhibit. Next up is a bat, also destined for the acacia bush. “Is it better,” Kirchhof wonders, for it “to be out of the light so children have to discover it? ‘Mom! There’s a bat!’ Or will it just be missed?” They opt to trust in the power of children to discover almost anything.

Elsewhere, the noise is appalling. One room full of fossils as delicate as glass is a maze traveled by six different lifts and cherry pickers, continually beeping their way into position. When one of the lighting mechanics goes to work up at the ceiling, it sounds like a lunatic attacking a metal drum with a sledgehammer. Every few minutes, the emergency alarm system rips the air with warning blasts, REE-uh, REE-uh, REE-uh, and a robotic voice commands, “PLEASE LEAVE THE BUILDING IMMEDIATELY BY THE NEAREST AVAILABLE EXIT. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE THE LIFTS.” Then it happens again in Arabic.

“That’s been going on since April or May. I don’t even hear it anymore,” says Matt Fair of RCI. He has been waiting a week to install a Camarasaurus in the Mesozoic Era but doesn’t mind that either, since he and his crew have so many other parts of the project to get done. Being imperturbable is item one in the job description.

In the hallway, Fair strikes up a conversation with a worker from Hasenkamp, the company that arranges the dinosaur flights then delivers, unpacks, and sometimes installs the specimens in their final display space. (The Hasenkamp crew does its work with grace and efficiency: When a worker balances on a simple device called a J-bar to ride a massive crate gently down to the ground, it is half skateboard trick, half ballet.) Fair says he needs a machine with a suction head powerful enough to lock onto a 2.4 billion-year-old slab of banded iron rock weighing 1,800 pounds, and move it into place. “We’ve never done that before,” says the man from Hasenkamp. “Neither have we,” says Fair, grinning.

When the window finally opens for the Camarasaurus installation, the steel posts and the horizontal armature go up quickly, followed by the torso and legs. Two days later, Fair is on a lift installing the neck. He clutches a vertebra to his chest, then raises it up and inserts the rod on the underside into the corresponding socket in the top of the armature. A twist of a wrench and he is on to the next one. They go in at the rate of about a minute apiece. Speed is a good thing just now, because the window for this installation is quickly closing.

With a few days left to the opening, McAlester is sitting on a plinth in the Mesozoic. She eyes the ceiling of the room, alive with a dazzling constellation of model pterosaurs in one area, ammonites in another, and, in a third, big, fierce fish hotly pursuing one another across a distant age. For a moment, she relishes how it is all working out. Then, just a thought: She wonders if they could take a few of the smaller pterosaurs from the ceiling and hang them in the café instead. Possibly before the opening? “I love the idea that you’re bringing people’s eyes up every time they walk into a room.” The modelmaker, in from New Zealand to finish the job, doesn’t say no.

Shortly after, the missing Diplodocus arrives and steps up onto its plinth in the atrium. A Triceratops will be late, and the staff moves in temporary substitutes. (Manning calls this “dinosaur Tetris.”) Then, four days before the opening, a last-minute guest enters via the shipping bay door, accompanied by a diplomatic entourage. It’s the world-famous Lucy, or her fossilized remains—among the earliest known members of the family tree that also includes Homo sapiens. Her three-month visit is a gift from the Ethiopian government, worked out just a few weeks before.

Opening night goes off without a hitch, and the people who built this museum get a chance to preen a little in the applause. What other natural history museums have taken centuries to accomplish, they have achieved in just five years. There are still of course fixes to make, still specimens to excavate, acquire, or exhibit, still scientific discoveries to be made. In the morning, they will wake up to the new reality of the museum and research center they have built.

Moving fast, being high-impact, and making a statement was never meant to end with opening day.