National Geographic has an interesting story about the making of the new Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi. The museum opened in late 2025, with beautiful modern exhibits. This is the story of its making…

Dinosaurs are winging in at 550 miles an hour from across the planet: Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, a herd of Triceratops, and a pair of Tyrannosaurus rex (plus a carcass for the tyrannosaurs to do combat over). The museum has them in a queue, along with thousands of other specimens, from a fog-basking beetle to a reconstructed dodo. Some of them are awaiting takeoff, and some are in flight. Others are being uncrated, condition-checked, 3D-scanned, and quickly moved out for reassembly on the museum floor, all to make room for the next specimens just rolling through the delivery bay door.

It’s early November 2025, and there are 20 days left until the opening of the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi (NHMAD), a 377,000-square-foot structure being built and populated on what even the museum’s managers admit is an “insanely short” five-year timeline. With luck, the final major specimen—the last of five 75-foot-tall sauropods greeting visitors at the entrance—will arrive in time to go on display a day or two before the soft opening. That’s when Abu Dhabi’s royal families will arrive, fully expecting to be impressed. At the moment, however, that dinosaur, a Diplodocus, is still in Canada. And the mount is not yet complete. No pressure, though.

The new museum stands on a sandy, low-lying island named Saadiyat, separated by an inlet off the Persian Gulf from metropolitan Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). Nearby in the neighborhood: the Louvre Abu Dhabi, opened in 2017, plus the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and a new national museum, both rushing to completion at the same time as the natural history museum. Much of the rest of the island is also under construction, with high-end hotels and housing for the crowds all these vaunted institutions are expected to attract.