The Stories We Keep: Bringing the World to Pittsburgh

The Stories We Keep is open now at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and it runs through January 2027. You'll find it on the third floor in the R.P. Simmons Family Gallery. It's the second installment of a multiyear series the museum is putting together to look at its own role as a steward and storyteller of global heritage. The first chapter, Conserving Objects From Ancient Egypt, opened back in 2024.

What the exhibition really leans into is the sheer scale of what the museum holds. We're talking 22 million objects and specimens, including an invertebrate zoology collection of more than 13 million pieces—a collection that got its start from Andrew Carnegie's investment in natural history back in the 1890s. The narrative traces those collections back to the global expeditions that built them, and to the people who ran the show. One name that comes up is William J. Holland, the museum director from 1898 to 1922, who brought the original name-bearing fossil of Diplodocus carnegii to Pittsburgh and bought Baron Ernest de Bayet's fossil collection for $25,000 in 1903.

There's a wall section called "Footage from Collections" that loops 4.5 minutes of behind-the-scenes imagery from the museum's scientific sections. It takes you into the storage areas for birds, amphibians, reptiles, insects, and invertebrate fossils, with cameos by the staff who actually care for them. It's a good way to see the parts of the museum that usually stay closed to the public.

If you want more to chew on, the show is accompanied by the podcast We Are Nature: The Anthropocene Archives, whose second season explores the Anthropocene era. Between the gallery and the podcast, there's plenty to sink into. The exhibition is in the R.P. Simmons Family Gallery on the third floor of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and it runs through January 2027.