The centerpiece of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is the Great Hall of Dinosaurs, which contains the mounted skeleton of a juvenile Apatosaurus, as well as specimens of Camarasaurus, Stegosaurus, Camptosaurus, and the primitive turtle Archelon. The museum's fossil wing also boasts a few primitive dino-birds (including Hesperornis and Ichthyornis), various fossil footprints, and a small display devoted to the fierce carnivore Deinonychus.
In the late 19th century, Yale University was a major party to the Bone Wars, the lifelong feud between the Yale-sponsored paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh and his rival Edward Drinker Cope. As a result, many of the dinosaur fossils Marsh unearthed in the western U.S. wound up being shipped east to New Haven, where they were studied (and sometimes put on display) in the Peabody Museum--which, incidentally, was named after Marsh's wealthy uncle George Peabody.
