World's youngest museum curator, 11, was led by a love of fossils

Anderson Taylor, 11, has been named the world's youngest male museum curator by Guinness World Records for running the Cambridge Natural History Museum in Cambridge, Illinois, which he opened in 2024 at age 9. The idea came from a family trip to Scotland, where he visited a small dinosaur museum and came home determined to start his own.

The museum houses about 13 display cases of seashells, minerals, gemstones, dinosaur fossils, replicas and Native American artifacts, arranged largely in a circle around one room. Many of his fossils, he says, come from the limestone gravel in his own driveway, including a crinoid fossil that was his first find.

His daily routine involves opening the museum around 6 a.m., studying rocks or giving tours, and occasionally being pulled out of school when a visitor books a reservation. He says he'd eventually like to curate the American Museum of Natural History, which the broadcast transcript briefly and incorrectly placed in Washington, D.C., before a correction noted it is in New York.

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