Top New York museum to remove all human remains from collection

President of American Museum of Natural History says historical thinking around such displays ‘deeply flawed’

New York’s American Museum of Natural History is to remove all human remains from its display collections in a reform predicated on revised thinking around collection practices that it now says were “deeply flawed”.

The US’s leading natural museum plans to overhaul its collection of about 12,000 human remains, including the skeletons of grave-robbed indigenous and enslaved people as well as the bodies of New Yorkers collected as recently as the 1940s.