Earth And Solar System Is Focus

Of New Peabody Exhibition

NEW HAVEN — The Yale Peabody Museum’s new permanent Hall of Minerals, Earth and Space, also known as HoMES, is designed to foster an appreciation for the wonders of this planet and show how man’s survival is inextricably linked to global interactions among the solid earth, its oceans, and its atmosphere.

The first phase of HoMES, “Earth and Space,” focuses on the earth and the solar system, geology and earth forces, atmospheres, oceans and climate. Featured components include two interactive globes, a plasma screen display with images of the solar system, a new diorama of the giant invertebrates of the Carboniferous, and the oldest rock known from earth. Phase I will open on May 18 and will remain on view indefinitely.

The second phase, “Gems and Minerals,” scheduled to open in 2007, will highlight the museum’s gem and mineral collection.

The Peabody’s meteorite collection is the oldest in the United States. HoMES provides the opportunity to display more of it, including some of the museum’s most important specimens: the meteorite from the very first documented meteorite fall in America in 1807; and the famous stone that crashed into a house in Wethersfield in 1982.

Specimens are employed to describe what meteorites are, where they come from, and what they tell us about the history of the solar system. Meteorites containing such substances as amino acids, sugars, hydrocarbons and even diamonds are on display, as well as rocks from the asteroid Vesta, the Moon and the planet Mars.

A historic 1,635-pound iron from Texas, the largest specimen of the Museum’s Division of Meteorites and Planetary Science, is also featured, as is an 826-pound iron from Meteor Crater in Arizona, used to illustrate what happens when a giant meteorite strikes the earth. From there, evidence for many impacts around the world leads to a description of the deadly event that marked the end of the dinosaurs and brought the Cretaceous Period to a close 65 million years ago.

The exhibition was curated by Jay J. Ague, professor of geology and geophysics at Yale, curator of mineralogy at the Yale Peabody Museum, and editor of the American Journal of Science.

Located at 170 Whitney Avenue, the museum is open Monday to Saturday, from 10 to 5, and Sunday from noon to 5.

For a list of special program information, admission fees and other information visit peabody.yale.edu or call the museum’s Infotape, 203-432-5050.