T his past weekend, for my 50th high-school reunion, I was in New Haven. Afterward, to feel bouncy and young, I went to the enthralling Peabody Museum, Yale’s natural history museum. Established in 1866, the Peabody owns, displays, and researches a phenomenal collection of dinosaur bones and fossils, but it’s best to call it a museum of the history of life. The raw material of my reunion was 50 years. The Peabody works with hundreds of millions. It has just had a massive, lovely overhaul, the first since the 1930s. The dinosaurs haven’t looked this good since right before an asteroid annihilated them, 66 million years ago, possibly tuned to “Candle in the Wind,” Elton John’s big 1974 hit. Certainly the dinosaurs deserved an exit melody more than Princess Diana did.

It’s a revelation to young people who might not understand that the misadventures and calamities and miracles of the world — and of life — didn’t start in 1619, 1776, or when their grandparents were born, right about when I finished high school. It’s good for all of us to think of life as a millions-of-years-old proposition, not a matter of a news cycle, and definitely not of “settled science,” a term I hate. At the Peabody, we learn how our oceans came to be born, why sea critters became landlubbers, why some learned to fly, what extinctions destroyed, what new life they kindled, and from whom we of 2024 descend. Nothing’s ever settled in nature, though a display of skulls of small-brained and big-brained human-like creatures does suggest that some things never change.

The new Peabody is fantastic. Edward Bass, the Fort Worth grandee, gave $160 million to Yale to overhaul the museum, a Gothic Revival pile so antiquated, gloomy, and musty that even dinosaurs dead for 66 million years rustled and roared for a snazzier space. Using the practical, client-oriented, and subtly stylish Centerbrook Architects, the Peabody got 50 percent more gallery space, modern systems, including 95 miles of new wiring, ten new classrooms, a refreshed exterior, and, above all, a happy Stegosaurus. He or she — dinosaurs, I’m sure, were oblivious to the nonbinary — is the size of a Ford F-150, in life armored, with pyramidical spikes running down its back, and fierce when piqued. Its cramped skeleton at the Peabody yearned for roomier digs.

On top of the new visitor-services booth, in the new lobby, sits — ready and poised — a cast of a skeleton of a Geosternbergia, a flying reptile the Wright Brothers might have channeled. It signals that the new museum has launched. Be prepared to learn. “The Way We Were,” Barbra Streisand’s 1974 hit, doesn’t involve dinosaurs, but a visit to the Peabody means going back in time.

Even the dinosaur bones and the fossils got a good grooming. Dressing for my reunion, I understood that even the most ancient of ancients worry about their looks. The total Peabody project took four years, during which it was closed. In the ’60s, living a few minutes from the Peabody, I was there a lot. I went to school at Yale and have watched with delight — and awe — as its museums, libraries, theaters, labs, dorms, and classrooms have been reborn, and elegantly so. Ed Bass, longtime chairman of the Yale board and its building committee, made much of this possible through his leadership, planning, and money. He knows every inch of the Yale campus and is a good guy to have on your side.

The Peabody experience starts with the walk to the museum from a now-free parking lot. The sidewalk is decorated with faux-dinosaur tracks — fun — and along the path are benches made of irregular blocks of granite, some fossil-bespeckled. There’s no admission charge now, thanks to a new endowment. That the Peabody charged a fee for years made me as cranky as a triceratops with a splinter. Yale’s loaded, and a trip to the Peabody is, among child townies at least, the ultimate in adventure travel.

The first display we see inside the museum is a succinct history of the Gold Rush, California Gold, brilliant in how it covers 150 million years, from molten rock meeting superheated water laced with gold particles to 1848, when a scraggly prospector near John Sutter’s mill thundered “Eureka!” Three rows of craggy gold chunks — not nice, refined bars but wild gold — show us why gold comes in varieties of yellows. Gold’s allure never fails. Its dazzle as the Peabody hints at more wonders to come.

The Burke Hall of Dinosaurs is a mother lode not of gold but of bones. Dinosaur bones, chief among them Yale’s brontosaurus, discovered in 1879 in Como’s Bluff, Wyo. It’s 150 million years old, plus or minus a few million years, and 65 feet long. The thing is YUGE. Its femurs alone weigh 600 pounds. Its name means “thunder lizard” in Greek. It’s the gallery’s Zeus, and for a bag o’ bones, it looks damn good, as good as the classmate or two at my reunion who, it seems, have had some work done. While the Peabody was closed, a fossil-restoration firm in Toronto gave things a good dusting and the fossil equivalent of a face peel, pedicure, and fresh bronzer, mascara, and lip gloss. No colonic cleansing needed on this trip to the spa!

The study of dinosaurs was new when the Yale scholar Othniel Marsh dug up the brontosaurus, so the discovery of the near-complete, behemoth skeleton made Yale the go-to place for all things Devonian, Permian, and Jurassic. Humanity’s greatest scientists — Archimedes, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Roger Bacon among them — knew next to nothing about dinosaurs. Here, Natives sometimes worshipped dinosaur tracks. Linnaeus had inklings, Charles Willson Peale led primitive digs for primitive brutes, the Romantics had visions, and, yes, the English found a fossil or two, but Marsh hit the jackpot.

Yale’s paleontologists tweaked the brontosaurus’s pose and posture to reflect new research. An armature supports each bone so it can be removed for study. Scholars are always finding new ways to think about dinosaurs. Years ago, the Yale brontosaurus’s skull was found to be wrong. Over millions of years, bones detach and shift. The correct one replaced it. While the museum was closed, scholars learned that its tail might have been longer. A few prosthetic links later, this beast is au courant and ready for the red carpet.

The new Peabody is wonderful, but humankind — especially the big-brained types — is imperfectible. The museum’s director and curators step on their own story by depicting Marsh as a scoundrel. In a wall panel on Marsh’s work — the one place to tout him — he’s dinged for swiping student research, stealing and destroying fossils found by competitor paleontologists, probably from Harvard, and “collecting fossils from Indigenous lands without permission.” Boo hoo. Oh, yes, in a sentence or two, he’s also credited with founding the Peabody and getting his moneybags Uncle Peabody to pay for the museum in which I stood and where the curators work.

Marsh’s actions, we read, are “inexcusable,” and “we still grapple with them,” though possibly not on payday. I had a Christian and classical education that’s served me well, and though I missed the class on forgiveness, grudge-holder that I am, I know we mustn’t judge people, especially the dead, by their worst days, unless, of course, we’re judging a Mao, Hitler, Stalin, the Boston Strangler, or the “River to the Sea” Hamasholes and Jew-haters. Yes, Marsh fought in what’s called the Bone Wars, a fight among academics mostly over fossils. Given the thousands of scientific papers retracted these days from what we thought were the finest journals because of fraud, Marsh’s peccadillos are very modest.

The storyline of life as told by the Peabody and viewed through its exceptional collection is clear and concise. It owns 14 million objects, so selecting what to display was an intense proposition. The wall cases, lighting, and wall colors are perfect. As an end result, every case is special, rich, and beautifully presented. Though the Peabody is a natural history museum with lots of bits and pieces millions of years old, its many stand-out objects are the stuff of awe. Nature is the most clever, subtle, and enigmatic of artists. It’s the original assembly line, to be sure, producing thousands of distinct flora and fauna but, within each species, excelling in mass production.

Nature also makes things of great beauty, of serene balance and symmetry, like the bones of a monosaur, similar to a modern whale and between 66 and 90 million years old. Once dead, it sank to the bottom of a deep ocean. Its bones didn’t scatter much. It looks like an abstract work of art. A 190-million-year-old ammonite fossil is Rococo-meets-Cretaceous and is sublimely presented in a round case. The fossil is salmon-colored and set perfectly against two shades of blue.

Rudolph Zallinger’s Age of Reptiles, from 1947, and Age of Mammals, from 1967, are Peabody icons. They’re two 100-or-so-foot representational murals depicting life on Earth from 362 million years ago to the end of the last big Ice Age 12,000 years ago. They’re literal, colorful, and compelling. Zallinger’s dinosaurs aren’t Jurassic Park cranky but more sedentary. The murals have been restored to their original high-key glory. For those of us who’ve been visiting the Peabody since time began, it’s good to see them still in place and celebrated.

Centerbrook, the architect, was the perfect choice. The firm is local, which is coincidental but very good. Why museums in America hire far-flung architects is beyond me, since inaccessibility is the recipe for hiccups. The firm does lots of work with academic institutions, so it knows the peculiar psychology of academe. Centerbrook designed Yale’s handsome School of Forestry building, so it knew Yale. Yale’s buildings come in many styles. It also has a history of distinguished architecture, so the bar for the Peabody was very high. New buildings must be statements of modernity, but they need to fit in the puzzle and, in the case of the Peabody, still look vaguely Gothic Revival. Everyone wanted it to look like the Peabody, a treasured on-campus friend and revered by the locals.

The Peabody building had many interior challenges. It had no insulation, for example, and had never been renovated, so everything behind the walls from ducts to pipes to wiring to the primitive HVAC system had to be replaced, as did the lighting, windows, and roof. Yale is a 325-year-old school in a city center — many of its buildings touch other buildings. The Peabody stands next to Yale’s geology building, designed by Philip Johnson, and its environmental-science building.

These buildings had to be relinked anew with the museum, given the many interior changes. High-end, historic features such as the Peabody’s dome were refreshed. The Peabody wasn’t entirely confined to a cramped footprint. It had an empty interior courtyard, which was filled in with a commodious living-room-like space and new galleries on the first floor, new galleries on the second and third floors, and an entirely new fourth floor, now used for offices.

I’d hoped the Peabody would stay clear of climate cant, the “we’re gonna die” melodrama based on fake science about fossil fuels. I resent the propaganda, sneaky that it is, and visitors should resent it, and the vast army of torosauruses underground resent it. Their decayed corpses, fermenting for millions of years, give us oil. They like feeling useful.

How sneaky? A kiosk near the Burke Gallery describes “climate inequity in New Haven,” a luxury belief if there ever was one. It’s an odd carbuncle, especially since it’s in a space on the evolution of intelligence, but another nearby kiosk is entitled “TAKE ACTION” and, through a scan, links us to the New Haven Climate Movement. It’s a group that promotes climate hysteria and hypnosis. I read its 18-page Reality Check, which sits, fat and prosperous with Soros, Chinese, and tech billionaire money, on the intersection of hubris, lies, greed, and fantasy. Yale is promoting this and, instead of putting the physical propaganda there, is providing it electronically. It’s dino doo doo.

Putting aside the glaring, blazing, Godzilla-size fact that Yale at its best, the Peabody included, is here because of oil money, the Peabody needs to stay clear of issue advocacy. If it’s going to do an exhibition on fossil fuels, and this makes great sense, it doesn’t need to be fair and balanced. It needs to be truthful.

For example, I read labels describing many periods in prehistoric epochs where Earth’s climate catastrophically changed, and with no gas guzzlers or coal-burning plants to blame. These changes happened over tens of thousands of years. The asteroid hit 66 million years ago, I learned, killed the dinosaurs but didn’t, overall, affect Earth’s climate. Why shovel climate-change ordure at us on the basis of temperature records that are 50 years old, or when I was in high school? The climate-change hoax is a trillion-dollar business. Siloed, academic places can — I say “can,” since this is by no means a universal defect — embrace the role of useful idiot.

For example, the Peabody displays a case on early telescopes and early navigation gizmos. We’re told with the speed of light that these great finds facilitated colonialism and exploitation. In another space, we read that the “the dehumanizing institution of slavery shaped Yale science.” Cue “You’re No Good,” Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 hit. The grudge-and-grievance game — the past is filled with evildoers — does nothing but make people feel guilty and imprison them in their guilt.

These are ridiculous, trivial, juvenile observations, since the Peabody is, first and foremost, a natural history museum, not a science museum. It owns the drool collector of Pavlov’s dog, among many other science artifacts and, elsewhere on the second floor, treats the history of science starting with the Egyptians. But, really, did slavery shape Yale science? Of course not, however much the Peabody’s curators think otherwise.

Summer vacation is the perfect time for shedding bad hairdos, spent romances, and grossly inappropriate museum displays. Over the summer, I’d ditch the Marsh “he’s bad” placard. Goodness, the Peabody wouldn’t exist without him.Toss the climate kiosks. Call 1-800-JUNK-RAT. They trash rubbish, even of the ideological kind. Pluck the colonialism Tartufferie from an otherwise fascinating and educational case of pivotal navigational tools. Empty the slavery case, which is irrelevant, gratuitous, and a pious finger-wag. Small bits of intellectual hygiene, I think, serving the cause of perspective. It’s the director’s job to do this. He’s in charge of quality control.

The Peabody’s old Hall of Native American Cultures is gone, but that’s for another story. Its erasure of history, and that’s what it is, is the latest in a cold war over who’s entitled to display and interpret Native American artifacts, art, and history. The Native American grievance industry, which I wrote about two weeks ago, thinks it has a monopoly. This is a false value. Identity and history aren’t owned by anyone.

Not to dwell on these few failures, grim as they are, I think the new Peabody is splendid. I loved the mineral gallery on the third floor, but I’m partial to bright, shiny things. The Met gala-goers, bedecked in gems and sparkles, might party with a swagger and in splendor, but they stand in the spotlight with minerals that, in the raw and millions of years old, are a thrill to see. The Peabody’s a thrill to see.