Museum of Natural History...NYC

This has been one of my favorite, personal treasures from New York City since I was a small child. This awesome museum always mesmerized me. I walk inside and feel so nostalgic about life. The American Museum of Natural History is one of the world’s preeminent scientific and cultural institutions. Since its founding in 1869, the Museum has advanced its global mission to discover, interpret, and disseminate information about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe through a wide-ranging program of scientific research, education, and exhibition. The Museum is renowned for its exhibitions and scientific collections, which serve as a field guide to the entire planet and present a panorama of the world's cultures.

As you start off at the Grand Gallery, just inside the 77th Street entrance, (a gathering place for visitors), you are greeted by a 63-foot-long Great Canoe that hangs suspended from the ceiling. The canoe provides a dynamic focal point to this hall. The Grand Gallery is also home a colorful ancient ammonite, a spectacular stibnite, a rare slab of jadeite jade, and a case of ancient trilobite fossils. Each gorgeous. And, if you want a quick bite, the Café on One is just around this corner.

Now on to the exhibits. Our favorite: The Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. This hall highlights the drama of the undersea world and its diverse and complex web of life in a fully immersive marine environment. The hall is home to one of the Museum’s most celebrated displays—a 94-foot-long, 21,000-pound model of a blue whale suspended from the ceiling. Every time I see this whale, I get the same feel. Utter excitement, pure joy, and awe. This creature was in the ocean about 3.5 billion years ago that the first life on Earth arose. Today, the planet’s oceans are home to an amazing diversity of life in a wide range of habitats, from tropical coral reefs to the frigid polar seas. Still, many parts of the ocean are poorly known, and less than 5 percent of the deep ocean has been explored. For every new species, there may be hundreds more yet to be discovered. The 29,000-square-foot hall features models of more than 750 sea creatures, ranging from tiny green bubble algae to computerized glowing jellyfishes. The hall also includes high-definition video projections, interactive computer stations, hands-on models, 14 classic dioramas, and eight ocean ecosystem displays that transport visitors from the profusion of life in the Indo-Pacific coral reefs to the bioluminescent fishes in the eerie darkness of the deep sea.

Another favorite is Mammal Halls – in particular African Mammals and Asian Mammals. The Akeley Hall of African Mammals showcases large mammals of Africa. At the center is a freestanding group of eight elephants, poised as if to charge, surrounded by 28 habitat dioramas. These life-size dioramas provide a unique glimpse of the diverse topography of Africa and its wildlife, from the Serengeti Plain to the waters of the Upper Nile to the volcanic mountains of what was once the Belgian Congo. As in all of the Museum’s habitat dioramas, each scene is a re-creation based on the meticulous observations of scientists in the field in the early 20th century, and the on-site sketches and photographs of the artists who accompanied them. Animals are set in a specific location, cast in the light of a particular time of day. They are realistic and jaw dropping.

The Hall of Asian Mammals focuses on large mammals from India, Myanmar, and Thailand. Animals featured in the hall’s dozen habitat dioramas include the water buffalo, leopard, hoolock gibbon, and rhinoceros. Also represented are the banting, black buck, chinkara, chital or axis deer, guar, sambar, swamp deer, wild dog, and thamin or Eld’s deer.  Like the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, this hall features a centerpiece grouping of freestanding elephants, encouraging comparisons between the two types—the Asian elephant being generally smaller than the African elephant and having smaller ears and a higher forehead. Many of the animals represented in this hall are threatened by poaching and loss of habitat. In fact, in the 1990s, two Asian mammals, the Siberian tiger and the giant panda, were placed in the case featuring endangered species in the Hall of Biodiversity.

Next on our list is Fossil Halls: One of two halls in the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing, the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs features fossils from one of the two major groups of dinosaurs. The ornithischians are characterized by a backward-pointing extension of the pubis bone, which is thought to have helped to support the enormous stomachs that these dinosaurs needed to digest the masses of tough vegetation they ate. Within the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs, exhibits explore two evolutionary branches within this group: the genasaurs, which are defined by the development of inset tooth rows that form cheeks, and the cerapods, identified by an uneven covering of tooth enamel. These traits may have made holding and chewing food easier. Together, the two halls of the Koch Dinosaur Wing feature about 100 specimens, 85 percent of them fossils, rather than casts. These 100 specimens are just a small fraction of the Museum’s collection of dinosaur fossils, which is among the largest and most scientifically important of such collections in the world.

The Hall of Primitive Mammals, one of two halls in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives, traces the lower branches of the evolutionary tree of mammals, including monotremes, marsupials, sloths, and armadillos. The roots of the mammalian line reach back almost 300 million years. Some of the very early mammal relatives dominated the landscape millions of years before dinosaurs appeared, and most of these species became extinct. During the age of dinosaurs, most mammals were not much bigger than small rodents. It was after the extinction of the large dinosaurs that the great diversity of mammals arose. This hall highlights the development of such key mammalian physical features as the synapsid opening in the skull, a large hole behind the eye socket for muscles that extend to the jaw; three middle ear bones; and the placenta. These traits correspond to eating, hearing, and reproduction, and each trait represents the splitting off of an evolutionary branch. Animal groups represented in this hall include monotremes, multituberculates, triconodonts, edentates, and extinct relatives of mammals, such as the Dimetrodon and glyptodonts. Some living animals from these groups, such as the egg-laying mammal platypus, a monotreme, are called “living fossils.”

We could go on but there is just too much to see and take in. You might not get to absorb everything in this museum in one day, but make sure you give yourself a nice chunk of time to take in as much as you can. We’re sure you’ll be back again to see what you missed. Don’t come to the city without visiting this wonderful museum.


Permanent Exhibitions: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions
Current Exhibitions: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions
Space Show: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/space-show
Calendar: http://www.amnh.org/calendar