by Adele Oliveira on
BETWEEN EXHIBITS AT THE New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, in Albuquerque’s Sawmill District, a group of kids crowds around a small display of unassuming brown fragments. Reading the accompanying plaque, they discover they’re staring at fossilized dinosaur eggshells found just west of the city in 1997 by a three-year-old boy on a camping trip. The boy insisted to his father that he’d found dinosaur eggs—and he was right. When they took the pieces to the museum, scientists determined the fossils dated to the upper Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago. The children wonder aloud if they too might make their own prehistoric discoveries.
If they go hunting in New Mexico, there’s a decent chance they will.
“New Mexico is like a candy store,” says Spencer Lucas, the museum’s curator of paleontology. The Albuquerque native says he finds fossils every time he ventures into the field. “There’s so much rock exposed. You could almost say, Well, what kind of fossil do you care about finding—plant, insect, or dinosaur?”
Many of New Mexico’s paleontological discoveries are on display to the public for the first time as part of the museum’s $3.67 million remodel. After an eight-month closure, the museum reopened in April, drawing 32,500 visitors—132 percent more than the same month last year.
About one-third of the museum’s exhibit space has been refreshed, according to executive director Anthony Fiorillo. During a tour of the renovated museum, Fiorillo and Lucas lead the way upstairs, where the former Origins gallery has been reimagined as the Bradbury Stamm Construction Hall of Ancient Life, featuring 300 previously undisplayed specimens from the museum’s vault, many collected by Lucas, who remembers finding his first fossil at age six during a family picnic near Las Vegas, New Mexico.
In designing Ancient Life, Lucas wanted visitors to experience what he calls the “kaleidoscope of ancient environments” that once existed across what’s now New Mexico between 250 million and 500 million years ago—from seafloors of sand, mud, and limestone to vast deserts and dense forests. As Lucas moves through the gallery, he stops at an interactive map that shows continents morphing over millennia. He zeroes in on New Mexico’s shifting landscapes, watching the Permian Sea evaporate in hypercondensed geologic time.
“Over here, we have an ancient forest and this big millipede bumping along with early reptiles,” he says, pointing to a model of a dog-size insect, Arthropleura, the largest known arthropod. Lucas discovered one of its fossilized trackways near Abiquiú.
On the ground floor, the traveling exhibition Animal Armor: The Evolution of Armor in Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals is enhanced with only-in–New Mexico additions from the museum’s permanent collection of more than 100,000 specimens. One highlight is a jaw fragment belonging to Deinosuchus, the largest crocodilian ever known to exist, found in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness.
The renovation extends beyond fossils to the gift shop, lobby, interpretive displays, and lighting. Nostalgic visitors who fondly remember school field trips to the museum can still find many of its beloved features intact, such as the thrilling faux lava-flow walkway in the volcanoes exhibit, newly visible under fresh Plexiglas and so vibrant that some of the youngest guests ask to be carried over the lava.
For Fiorillo, the museum’s greatest appeal remains the ever-evolving nature of paleontology, where new information can reshape our understanding of the distant past. Fossils collected decades ago are sometimes only now being identified. For example, fossils of Ahshiselsaurus wimani, a duck-billed dinosaur, were first discovered in 1916 in the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness of San Juan County but were not properly classified until 2025.
We watch as a few kids hurry their adults down a ramp toward the asteroid exhibit, where projected images and rumbling sound effects re-create the chaos of the extinction event. Delighted shrieks erupt from inside as the asteroid makes impact.
“Any curious kid who wanders around outside can make an important discovery,” Fiorillo says. “If someone finds something cool and they don’t understand it, hopefully they’ll come to our museum and ask, Hey, what’s this?”
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