Princeton University closed its Natural History Museum in Guyot Hall last month to provide space for a new environmental research unit. The move has angered university graduates and researchers worried that its historic collection may disappear into storage or be damaged when moved to a promised new facility.

Opened in 1909, the museum on the New Jersey campus drew large numbers of adults and children each year. It housed specimens from a century of palaeontological and geological discoveries by explorers from the university, including artefacts from a prehistoric Swiss village discovered in 1878, specimens of the moa — an extinct giant bird — and a virtually complete Allosaurus.

Princeton officials say they plan to house some specimens in a $65 million extension, to be built in the next five years, which may combine biological, atmospheric and Earth sciences. But some current and former members of the geosciences department fear the collection could be broken up and distributed to other facilities, severing Princeton's ties to a golden era of discovery.

In the early 1980s, Princeton gave its vertebrate palaeontology research collection to Yale University, a move that prompted a similar swell of discontent. “The university is making a serious error in getting rid of this inspirational space,” geology professor Lincoln Hollister wrote to Princeton president Harold Shapiro.

Hollister is among a group calling for a year's moratorium on dismantling the museum so funds can be raised to enhance it. Shapiro was unavailable for comment.

Meanwhile, the space is being converted into offices for the Environmental Institute, the recipient of major research grants from the National Science Foundation and British Petroleum, which is sponsoring research into carbon sequestration in old wells.

“I think it is deplorable that Princeton is closing the museum,” says Lydia Fox, a Princeton graduate who is now chair of geosciences at the University of the Pacific in California. “A natural history museum can be a critical form of outreach to an increasingly science-illiterate citizenry.”

More than 100 geoscience graduates have asked Princeton's president to reprieve the museum. Last month, a study showed the specimens were extremely valuable, but vulnerable to damage if moved.

Oceanographer George Philander, Princeton's chairman of geosciences, is apologetic for the way that the university has handled the museum closure, saying he “completely underestimated the emotional attachment” to the facility.

But Philander insists that the planned new facility will be popular. Museums like the one in Guyot Hall “have been able to describe what the world was like,” he says. “Now we are on the verge of being able to describe why the world is the way it is. We want a museum to reflect that.”