The Storefront That Doesn't Look Like a Store
687 Broadway sits between Houston and Bond Streets, in the part of SoHo that used to be cast-iron warehouses and is now a strip of boutique retail. The Evolution Store is the only ground-floor tenant that hasn't changed in 30 years. Black awning. Big window. Inside the window: a full Asian elephant skull on a mahogany stand, three feet tall, tusks intact. People stop to photograph it. They almost never come in.
Step through the door and the room opens up wider than you'd expect. Two floors of glass cabinets, lit warm. Fossil ammonites the size of dinner plates. Trays of preserved beetles arranged by color. A 12-foot articulated alligator skeleton hung from the ceiling. The lighting is museum-grade. The price tags are not.
Why It's Allowed to Exist
Almost everything in the store is legal under U.S. wildlife regulations. The skulls are mostly antique or ethically sourced from natural deaths, with paperwork. The insects come from breeders in Indonesia and Peru who collect under license. The fossils are from regulated digs in Morocco, Madagascar, and Wyoming.
The store keeps a binder behind the counter for any item that could ever be questioned at a customs check. That binder is the reason serious collectors come here instead of online. The Evolution Store has been around long enough to have built relationships with auction houses, museums, and private estates. When the American Museum of Natural History downsizes a redundancy from its collection, those pieces sometimes end up here.
What You Can Actually Buy
Some sample price points from a recent visit: a Megalodon shark tooth, six inches long, $400. A taxidermied red fox in repose, $1,200. A tray of 24 framed iridescent beetles from Borneo, $185. An entire articulated coyote skeleton mounted on a walnut base, $4,800. A real human medical-school skull (antique, with full provenance), $2,200.
The cheaper end is just as interesting: Vials of trilobite fossils, $12. A small vial of meteorite fragments from Argentina, $25. A single butterfly under a glass dome, $35. The store works as a gift shop for anyone with a teenage nephew or a friend who decorates with bones.
A Movie Star Without Knowing It
The Evolution Store has been a backdrop in dozens of productions. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight used a window arrangement. CSI: New York shot the alligator skeleton three episodes in. Law & Order has used the storefront as B-roll so many times that the production assistants in the show actually know the staff by name. The shop also rents pieces for stage productions, including a long-running Broadway run of The Lion King that needed real animal skulls for the savannah scene.
Nobody at the store seems particularly impressed by this. The owner, William Stevens, opened the place with a single fossil mineral booth at a flea market in 1992 and stocked the first store with what he could carry by hand. The expansion since then has been slow and quiet.
Why It's the Calmest Store on Broadway
There's something about a room full of bones that makes everyone whisper. The acoustics are partly responsible — the cabinets absorb sound, the carpet is thick. But the staff also keep the music low and the conversations short. Most customers wander for an hour and don't speak. When you do speak, the staff are surprisingly informative — they can tell you the geological age of any fossil by sight, or which Indonesian river a particular insect was collected from.
The Backroom Most People Miss
Past the main floor and up a narrow staircase is a smaller second room with the fragile pieces: trilobite plates from Morocco still embedded in matrix, a delicate skeleton of an unborn rhinoceros from a 1920s natural history sale, vintage scientific instruments. This room sees maybe one in ten visitors. It's where the staff eats lunch when nobody is around.
If you ask, they will sometimes show you items not on the floor — pieces from estate purchases that haven't been catalogued yet. That's the part of the store that feels closest to the original 1992 idea. A shelf of skulls without price tags. A drawer of unsorted ammonites. The store as a working collection.
Practical notes
- Address: 687 Broadway, between Houston and Bond Streets, SoHo
- Getting there: 6 to Bleecker; B/D/F/M to Broadway-Lafayette; R/W to 8th Street–NYU
- Go for: The hung alligator skeleton, the trays of iridescent beetles, the affordable $25 meteorite vials
- Size / timing: Two floors, roughly 4,000 square feet. 30–60 minutes is the sweet spot. Open daily 11 a.m.–8 p.m.
- Photograph it, but know this: Staff are fine with phone shots but ask before using flash. Reflections in the glass cases ruin most photos — angle 45 degrees off the front face.
The Evolution Store is one of those Manhattan retailers that makes more sense the longer it stays open. SoHo is full of stores that flip every two years. This one has been selling fossils to the same neighborhood since the Clinton administration. Walk in once. Buy nothing. Come back six months later when you do, in fact, need a skull for your office.
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Sources consulted: The Evolution Store · The New York Times · Atlas Obscura · Untapped Cities · Time Out New York
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