An 11-Year-Old Boy in a Small Midwestern Town Just Became the Guinness World Record Holder for Being the Youngest Museum Curator

Four years after Anderson Taylor began collecting specimens, he opened the Cambridge Natural History Museum in Cambridge, Illinois, offering school tours and attracting visitors from across the region

Jess Daninhirsch | Reporting Intern, Museums

August 11, 2026 1:53 p.m.

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It’s not uncommon for a 9-year-old 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, was recently 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 August 10, 2024, when he was just 9 years and 340 days old.

Taylor had been thinking about the museum for years.

“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 a remarkable turn of events, he happened to find a fossil in his yard, jumpstarting his passion for paleontology.

Throughout his childhood, he collected more fossils. Some were from the Cambridge area, and some from his family trip to Scotland, where he found inspiration in a small museum not unlike his own. At his school, he and his friends often dig through a limestone gravel playground find archaeological treasures.

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. A grant from the city, bestowed after many presentations, helped provide seed money for his project. A GoFundMe allowed Taylor and his family purchase the building.

“We can probably end up expanding our building outwards and build on a whole new section,” Taylor says. “Plans always are changing, so if it does change, we’ll have to find a new way.”

Located in downtown Cambridge, the museum is now a fixture in the city. Community members have provided support, including artifact donations, and the museum has drawn in hundreds of visitors.

“We have a bunch of fossils, we’ve got a bunch of minerals, Native American artifacts, some taxidermy animals, some newer stuff like that too,” Taylor says. “Now we’ve got around 13 displays, and we’re always getting more.”

“It’s crazy to learn the stories of some of the artifacts you get,” Taylor adds.

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 favorite among visitors is the Tully monster, or Tullimonstrum, the state fossil of Illinois; the museum has three of them.

Youngest Person to Curate a Museum! | Guinness World Records

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Prior to the Cambridge Natural History Museum, the small Illinois town, population 2,000, had a few historical sites and a now-closed toy museum, but nothing to the scale of the museum Taylor has envisioned.

Taylor also delivers presentations to local school groups, both at his museum and on the road. Corrina Sprung, the Taylors’ next-door neighbor, attests to being a regular visitor to the museum.

“His passion is contagious,” she says. “His public speaking is just amazing to me. As young as he is, and as knowledgeable as he is, he really loves to get up in front of people and share all the different things that he’s learned…It’s like his museum has more than the borders of the walls.”

“I love that he brought this to our small community,” says Logan Meier, a Cambridge local who works with Taylor’s father, John. “It gives people something to look forward to when it’s open, something that can bring their kids to, to maybe learn a thing or two.”

Taylor advises visitors to check the museum’s Facebook page before planning a visit, as his schedule often changes with school and other responsibilities.

Jess Daninhirsch is a reporting intern focusing on museums for Smithsonian magazine.