I love smaller museums like the North Museum of Nature and Science. You can tell that they were labors of love to build, and almost all of them were created as gifts of kindness from small groups of dedicated people, or in this case, one single person. Lancaster businessman Hugh North founded this museum in 1953 along with the help of Franklin & Marshall college as a way to help educate local kids who lived too far away to travel to the huge dinosaur hot-spots like The Smithsonian in DC or the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Considering its size and reach, The North Museum has a pretty impressive collection of dinosaur fossils including this Stegosaurus skull and tail spike (The spike ins’t pictured here, it was in a different case across the hall!) This is exactly the type of place that would have blown my mind when I was in grade school, so I’m happy for the kids in this area that get to grow up with their “own” museum thanks to the generosity of one man over 70 years ago.
Lancaster, PA – North Museum of Nature & Science
