[2] In addition to portraits the museum's collection eventually included natural history specimens, fossils, archaeological finds, native American and Asian objects and curiosities.

[2] In 1794 Peale accepted the post of librarian at the American Philosophical Society and moved his home and museum to their building at Fifth and Chestnut Streets.

[1] In 1801 Peale visited a farm in New York State to view some recently discovered bones of a mastodon, an extinct relative of the European mammoth which was then known as the Great Incognitum.

The excavation involved draining a 12 foot pit and took six weeks,[3] but eventually the first nearly complete skeleton of the species was recovered.

[3] The skeleton was purchased by the naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup in 1854 and is now in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt in Germany.

That building burned down in 1854[7] The majority of the Philadelphia collection was sold to P. T. Barnum and Moses Kimball in 1849 and was subsequently lost or destroyed.