A slice of the Moon you can touch. Two real T. rexes locked in what scientists believe was a deadly fight. A whale skeleton found by residents simply walking through a mangrove at low tide. A 25-metre blue whale skull so large that builders had to cut a hole through a wall to bring it in.
These are just some of the scenes greeting visitors as the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi opens to the public on 22 November in Saadiyat Cultural District — a museum built, as its director describes it, “in record time”, yet filled with specimens that span almost the entire history of the universe.
Inside the cavernous new Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, time does not move forward — it collapses. You step from stardust older than the Sun to footprints of ancient elephants that once roamed Abu Dhabi. The first gallery opens in darkness to reveal the night sky exactly as it appeared over Abu Dhabi on 16 December 1971. “This is basically what the sky looked like… when the UAE was born,” assistant Curator Sara Al Marzooqi explained during a preview tour on Wednesday.
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Just steps away, an Australian meteorite holds fragments 7.5 billion years old — “small crystals that are older than the Solar System, older than our own Sun”. Curators call it the museum’s “oldest thing”. Across the room, visitors can place a hand on what the team describes as the largest piece of the Moon on Earth available for touch — a 45.8-kilogram lunar rock found recently in Libya. “Here you can touch the Moon, make a wish,” a curator says as she gestures to its polished surface.
A night sky of ‘stars’, and two T. Rexes that actually fought
Visitors expecting a handful of highlights will quickly realise the scale is far larger. “People will come with the expectation… there’ll be 12 maybe three or four star objects… what you will discover at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi is that we have so many stars that it’s a night sky of stars,” the museum’s director, Peter C. Kjærgaard, noted.
Among the most striking is a pair of real Tyrannosaurus rex fossils positioned mid-battle. “We have a scene with two T. rex fighting — both of them real fossils.” One skull still bears the unmistakable bite mark of another T. rex. Behind them lies the fossil of a Triceratops, also marked by T. rex teeth — evidence, the director explains, that it “has been killed by the T-rex,” he explained.
Inside the Triceratops ribcage is an almost invisible detail: scratches left by a tiny mammal that had been scavenging from within just before the asteroid that ended the dinosaur era struck 66 million years ago. “Those mammals… survived,” the director says. “The dinosaurs… all dinosaurs [died], but the mammals survived.”
A UAE savannah 7 million years ago
Turn the corner and the museum drops visitors into the Lost Worlds of Abu Dhabi — a dramatic recreation of the emirate as it appeared seven million years ago. “There was not a desert. It was a savanna landscape, lots of life — elephants, tigers, crocodiles, giraffes,” Kjærgaard says. A towering reconstruction of ancient riverbank roots from Abu Dhabi shows exactly how vegetation once flourished here.
Climate change transformed that savannah into today’s desert, the director notes. “This gives us evidence of how different the world could actually be when the climate is changing… and we have the power to do something about it.”
Nearby, curator Sara Al Marzooqi showed the jaws of ancient hippos and the four-tusked ancestor of elephants, the Stegotetrabelodon syrticus. A fossilised trackway found in the Western Region revealed that herds moved in protective family patterns, “and the babies always moved in the middle” — behaviour unchanged even today.
A whale discovered by residents
One of the museum’s most unusual installations sits beneath the massive real skull of a blue whale. Tucked below it is the skeleton of a Bryde’s whale, displayed as if resting in the mangroves where it was discovered. “One of the amazing things… nobody thinks about when they go to the beach… is that those giants live just out here,” Kjærgaard noted.
The whale wasn’t found by researchers, but by people walking through the mangroves. “At low tide you see the bones coming up,” he said. “It was found… by people just surveying the mangroves… not museum scientists.”
He hopes more discoveries will come from the public: “If they find something extraordinary, they should call us… Nature is just all around us and it’s constantly trying to get our attention.” A museum hotline will be made available for such finds, he added.
A treasure hunt for children
The team has embedded a second museum within the museum — one that only children perceive. Scattered across displays is a supersized version of the tardigrade, or “water bear,” a microscopic survivor capable of living in the desert, the deep ocean, or even space. “We’ve scaled it up… and we have tardigrades throughout the museum,” the director says. Children can follow a treasure-hunt path designed around them.
Behind the scenes: thousands of people, five years
The scale of the project becomes clearer when its timeline is revealed. “From the initial idea until this finished museum, it took five years,” Kjærgaard says — an effort he calls unprecedented. Though the scientific team is still growing, “it takes thousands of people to build a natural history museum.” The museum houses researchers working on active scientific questions and aims to become a resource hub for workshops and future scientists. “We want to address the young generation… inspire them.”
Life today and lessons for tomorrow
The final galleries shift from ancient worlds to present-day ecosystems, from Abu Dhabi’s mountains and deserts to Tasmania’s rainforests and the deep sea. A fully articulated 25-metre blue whale — a real skeleton recovered in Canada — arcs across the ceiling. “The skull is the largest individual piece we have in this museum… we had to keep a hole in the wall to bring this skull in,” explained the Assistant Curator.
The journey ends with a reminder of what humanity can lose — and what it can save. A dodo skeleton stands as a cautionary tale of human-driven extinction. Nearby, a real microscope shows a tardigrade in its desiccated survival state, capable of enduring extremes by curling into a near-lifeless ball.
‘A museum for everyone’
What the director hopes visitors take away is simple: ownership. “We want this to be a place where you feel you belong… a great place to hang out with friends and family.” Whether through community science, children’s discovery layers, or the sheer drama of standing beneath a blue whale, the aim is to bring people into the story of the natural world — and into the future of science in the UAE. “This is just the beginning,” he added.
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