9-Year-Old Boy is World's Youngest Museum Curator
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It’s not unusual for a child to love dinosaurs, but it is quite rare for someone so young to have opened a museum of their own dedicated to fossils and natural history.
Anderson Taylor, now 11, has been awarded the Guinness World Record for being the youngest male curator of a museum, the first to ever hold the title. He opened the Cambridge Natural History Museum in Cambridge, Illinois, on 10 August 2024, when he was just a couple of weeks shy of his tenth birthday.
“Back when I was around 3 years old, I was watching a show on dinosaurs, and I decided that I wanted to go find some fossils,” he tells Smithsonian. “So I went outside to my driveway.” In an extraordinarily serendipitous turn of events, he actually found a fossil in his yard, jump-starting his passion for paleontology. Throughout his childhood, he collected more fossils and when he was 7, Taylor began planning his museum as a place to store his collection and provide a space to teach others about the natural world.
After a GoFundMe campaign and a donation from the city, he was able to realise his dream.
His favorite fossil of the 1,000 or so items in the collection comes down to a tie between an opalized dinosaur bone and a mastodon femur. A popular favourite among visitors is the Tully monster, or Tullimonstrum, the state fossil of Illinois; the museum has three of them.
Naturally, the 11-year-old has to make his work at the museum fit around school and other responsibilities, so recommends that visitors check the museum’s Facebook page before planning a visit.
