Museum With Renowned Dinosaur Fossils Gets a $25 Million Gift

Carole Kamin first walked through the doors of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1975 after taking a job as a buyer for the Pittsburgh museum’s gift shop. Awe-struck by the fossils on display, she would style herself as a “dinosaur queen” for the next 20 years.

She sourced dino-patterned fabric from India for barbecue aprons. She worked with a toy manufacturer to produce models of the museum’s ancient creatures. She persuaded a candy supplier to make caramel-filled “Sweet Beasts.”

Now Kamin and her husband, Daniel, are donating $25 million toward renovating the museum, which was founded in 1895 and has one of North America’s largest museum collections of fossils. The gift comes at a time when dinosaurs are as firmly entrenched in the zeitgeist as ever, thanks in part to record-setting fossil auctions and blockbuster films.

The Carnegie museum’s holdings include the species-defining fossils — known as holotypes — of the terrifying predator Tyrannosaurus rex and the giant herbivore Apatosaurus louisae.

It also displays arguably the most famous dinosaur skeleton on Earth: the remains of Diplodocus carnegii, a long-necked dinosaur found in 1899 during an expedition funded by the steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Replica casts of the dinosaur, known as “Dippy,” reside in museums around the world.

“This is a dinosaur town,” said Matt Lamanna, the museum’s curator of vertebrate paleontology. “It’s a source of civic pride.”

The Kamins’ donation will give the exhibit housing these ancient creatures, as well as surrounding displays, its first major upgrade in nearly two decades. A majority of their gift will create an endowment to fund research at the museum in perpetuity.

“I know how hard it is to get money for research and even positions,” said Carole Kamin, an emeritus member of the museum’s advisory board. “I just feel really, really good about this, knowing that it’s going to help have the right people there.”

It is a perilous moment for the natural world that museums catalog. Beyond the exhibits they host, natural history museums preserve the world’s cultural and biological heritage.

“There’s so much changing so rapidly, especially as it relates to biodiversity and the environments that we all call home, but these changes don’t make sense unless we can look at that across millions of years,” said Gretchen Baker, the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. “Natural history museums are really the only place that can provide that kind of context, because we have the actual specimens and evidence of that change over time.”

Some keepers of this archive are struggling to survive. Last year, Duke University announced plans to close its herbarium, one of the country’s largest collections of plant, fungi and algae specimens. The Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, N.Y., announced in January that $30 million in pledged donations had fallen through, jeopardizing its ability to pay the mortgage on its Museum of the Earth.

Over the past decade, though, several institutions have received large gifts to renovate marquee dinosaur exhibits and support research into the extinct reptiles.

Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History received a $160 million gift in 2018, and from 2016 to 2017, Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund manager, gave the Field Museum in Chicago over $21 million for its dinosaur exhibits.

Last year, Griffin bought a Stegosaurus fossil known as “Apex” at auction for $44.6 million and then agreed to loan it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It is now being displayed in the museum’s recently opened Gilder Center, a $465 million expansion seeded by Richard Gilder, the banker and philanthropist.

The Kamins’ gift to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History follows a $65 million donation that the couple — Daniel Kamin is the president of the Pittsburgh-based commercial real estate firm Kamin Realty — made last year to its sister institution, the Carnegie Science Center. Their combined $90 million in donations marks the largest philanthropic contribution to Carnegie Museums since Carnegie himself.

Private support for research stands to become more important in the years to come, as the Trump administration considers cutting federal support to scientific and medical research.

“We exist because of private philanthropy, because Andrew Carnegie wanted to give back to the city where he had built his extraordinary wealth,” said Steven Knapp, the president and chief executive of Carnegie Museums. “It’s kind of at the heart of what makes it possible for institutions like ours to exist and to thrive.”

When Carole Kamin was grinding away in her mid-20s, her work at the museum even bled into her sleep. She dreamed of baby dinosaurs running amok in the museum’s basement, and of ancient winged reptiles known as pterosaurs soaring over Slippery Rock Creek, a stream north of Pittsburgh.

The gift by the Kamins helps ensure that national history museums like the one that ignited her imagination will remain.

“It’s a source of education for young people — of being curious about our world in general — and it sparks the interest in and curiosity of how the world even began,” she said. “It’d be a lonely planet without having them.”