American Museum of Natural History facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
American Museum of Natural History

Facade of the east entrance from Central Park West
Established	April 6, 1869; 156 years ago (1869-04-06)
Location	200 Central Park West New York, N.Y. 10024 United States
Type	Private 501(c)(3) organization Natural history museum
Visitors	5 million (2018)
Public transit access	New York City Bus: M7, M10, M11, M79 New York City Subway: ​ train at 81st Street–Museum of Natural History  train at 79th Street

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is a huge natural history museum in New York City. It's located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, right across from Central Park. The museum is made up of 20 connected buildings. Inside, you'll find 45 permanent exhibit halls, plus a planetarium and a library.

The museum has about 32 million items in its collections. These include plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, and human cultural artifacts. Only a small part of this huge collection can be shown at one time. The museum covers more than 2.5 million square feet (232,257 square meters). The AMNH has 225 full-time scientists and sends out over 120 special research trips each year. About five million people visit the museum every year.

The AMNH is a private organization. The idea for the museum came from a naturalist named Albert S. Bickmore in 1861. After years of hard work, the museum opened on May 22, 1871, in Central Park's Arsenal. The museum's first building, designed by Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould, opened on December 22, 1877. Many new sections have been added over the years, including the main entrance (named for Theodore Roosevelt) in 1936 and the Rose Center for Earth and Space in 2000.

Museum History

How the Museum Started

Early Ideas

The idea for the American Museum of Natural History began in 1861 with a naturalist named Albert S. Bickmore. He was studying in Massachusetts and noticed that many European natural history museums were in big cities. Bickmore thought New York City would be the best place for a major museum in the United States.

For several years, Bickmore worked hard to get a natural history museum started in New York. After the American Civil War, he asked important New Yorkers, like William E. Dodge Jr., to help fund his museum. Dodge couldn't fund it then, but he introduced Bickmore to Theodore Roosevelt Sr., who was the father of future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt.

People wanted a natural history museum even more after Barnum's American Museum burned down in 1868. In December of that year, eighteen important New Yorkers wrote to the Central Park Commission, asking for a museum in Central Park. The Central Park commissioner, Andrew Haswell Green, supported the idea in January 1869. A group of trustees was formed for the museum.

The next month, Bickmore and Joseph Hodges Choate wrote a plan for the museum, which the trustees approved. This plan was the first time the name "American Museum of Natural History" was used. Bickmore wanted the name to show his hope that the museum would become the most important of its kind in the country, like the British Museum. Before the museum could be created, Bickmore needed approval from Boss Tweed, a powerful political leader. The law to create the museum had to be signed by John Thompson Hoffman, the governor of New York, who was connected to Tweed.

Building the First Museum

Governor Hoffman signed the law creating the museum on April 6, 1869. John David Wolfe became its first president. The museum then asked if it could use the top two floors of Central Park's Arsenal, and this was approved in January 1870. Insect specimens were put on the lower floor, while stones, fossils, mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles were on the upper floor. The museum opened in the Arsenal on May 22, 1871.

The museum became very popular. In the first nine months of 1876 alone, 856,773 people visited the Arsenal location. This was more than the British Museum had in all of 1874!

Meanwhile, the museum's leaders found a spot for a permanent building called Manhattan Square. Important New Yorkers raised $500,000 for construction. The city's park commissioners then set aside Manhattan Square for the museum. Another $200,000 was raised. Many important people, including U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, attended the museum's groundbreaking ceremony on June 3, 1874.

The new museum building opened on December 22, 1877, with a ceremony attended by U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes. The old exhibits were moved from the Arsenal in 1878. By the next year, the AMNH had no debts.

Growth in the 1800s

At first, you reached the AMNH by a temporary bridge over a ditch, and it was closed on Sundays. In May 1881, the museum's leaders decided to finish the paths from Central Park. Work started later that year. By mid-1882, the landscape changes were almost done, and a bridge over Central Park West opened in November.

At this point, the museum's Manhattan Square building and the Arsenal couldn't hold any more items. The existing spaces, like the 100-seat lecture hall, were too small. The trustees started talking about opening the museum on Sundays in May 1885. The state government approved a law allowing Sunday openings the next year. Even though many people wanted it, the trustees were against Sunday openings because it would cost too much. At that time, the museum was open to the public from Wednesday to Saturday. It was only open to members on Mondays and Tuesdays. The museum's collections kept growing during the 1880s, and it hosted many lectures.

Since several departments were too crowded in the original building, New York state lawmakers suggested expanding the AMNH in early 1887. Thousands of teachers supported this idea. In March 1888, the trustees approved a new entrance at the center of the 77th Street side. The city began asking for bids from construction companies in late 1889. Many items in the museum's collection couldn't be shown until the new section opened.

The original building was updated in 1890, and the museum's library moved to the west wing that year. The AMNH's trustees thought about opening the museum on Sundays by February 1892 and stopped charging admission that July. The museum started Sunday operations in August, and the southern entrance opened in November. Even with the new section, there still wasn't enough space for the museum's collection. The city approved a new lecture hall in January 1893, but this was put off in May for a wing extending east on 77th Street. A contract to furnish the east wing was given out in June 1894.

When the east wing was almost finished in February 1895, the AMNH's trustees asked state lawmakers for $200,000 to build a wing extending west on 77th Street. The east wing was still being furnished by August; its ground floor opened that December. The museum's money and collections continued to grow. A hall of mammals opened in the museum in November 1896. That year, the AMNH was allowed to extend the east wing northward along Central Park West, creating an L-shaped building. Plans for an expanded east wing were approved in June 1897, and a contract was given out two months later. The museum's director, Morris K. Jesup, also funded trips around the world to get items for the collection. By mid-1898, the west wing, the expanded east wing, and a lecture hall were being built. However, the project was delayed because of a lack of city funding. The west and east wings, with several exhibit halls, were almost finished by late 1899, but the lecture hall was delayed. A hall for ancient Mexican art opened that December.

The 1900s and 2000s

Early 1900s to 1940s

The museum's 1,350-seat lecture hall opened in October 1900, along with the Native American and Mexican halls in the west wing. During the 1900s, the AMNH funded several trips to grow its collection. These included trips to Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, China, and local caves to collect rocks. One trip brought back a brontosaurus skeleton, which became the main attraction of the dinosaur hall that opened in February 1905.

In the early 1920s, museum president Henry Fairfield Osborn planned a new entrance for the AMNH. This entrance would also be a memorial to Theodore Roosevelt. Around the same time, the New York state government created a group to see if a Roosevelt memorial was possible. After some discussion about putting the memorial in Albany or New York City, the New York City government offered a spot next to the AMNH. The group decided against a "traditional Greek mausoleum" design. Instead, they chose a triumphal arch and hall in a Roman style. In 1925, the AMNH's trustees held a design competition, choosing John Russell Pope to design the memorial hall. Construction started in 1929, and the final plans were approved the next year. Roosevelt's cousin, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicated the memorial on January 19, 1936.

Mid-1900s to Late 1900s

The original building was later called "Wing A". In the 1950s, the top floor was made into a library. The ten-story Childs Frick Building, which holds the AMNH's fossil collection, was added to the museum in the 1970s.

The architect Kevin Roche and his company Roche-Dinkeloo have been in charge of planning for the museum since the 1990s. Many parts of the inside and outside have been updated. The Dinosaur Hall was renovated starting in 1991. Roche-Dinkeloo designed the eight-story AMNH Library in 1992. The museum's Rose Center for Earth and Space was finished in 2000.

The 2000s

The museum's lecture hall was renamed the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Theater in 2001 after Samuel J. LeFrak gave $8 million to the AMNH. The museum's south side, along 77th Street, was cleaned and repaired in 2009. This work included fixing 650 black-cherry window frames and stone repairs. The museum also restored a large painting in the Roosevelt Memorial Hall in 2010.

In 2014, the museum announced plans for a new $325 million section, the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. This new part would be on the Columbus Avenue side. On October 11, 2016, the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the expansion. Construction of the Gilder Center started in June 2019, after some community discussions.

The Gilder Center opened on May 4, 2023. The museum saw 1.5 million visitors in the next three months. In late 2023, the museum announced it would stop showing human remains from its collection. This was due to updated laws about Native American remains. After the law was changed in January 2024, the AMNH's Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains halls were closed because the museum would need special permission to display these remains.

Original Museum Building

The first building, in a style called Victorian Gothic, was designed by Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould. They also worked on Central Park. Their original idea was for this building to match the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the other side of Central Park.

The first building was in the middle of the 77th Street side. It was 199 feet (60.6 meters) long and 66 feet (20.1 meters) wide. It had a gallery that was 112 feet (34.1 meters) long and 200 feet (61 meters) tall. This gallery had a raised basement, three floors of exhibits, and a special attic. The back of the gallery had two towers, one for stairs and one for curators' rooms. This original building is still there, but it's now hidden by all the other buildings that have been added. You can still enter the museum through its 77th Street entrance, which is now called the Grand Gallery.

The full plan for the museum was much bigger. It called for twelve buildings similar to the original one. Eight buildings would form a square, and four more would be inside the square. There would be eight towers around the outside and a 120-foot (36.6-meter) wide dome in the center. Each building would have a ground floor, a second-floor gallery, a third floor for specimens, and a fourth floor for research. If the whole plan had been built, the museum would have been 850 feet (259.1 meters) from north to south and 650 feet (198.1 meters) from west to east. It would have covered over 18 acres (7.3 hectares), making it the largest building in North America and the largest museum building in the world. This huge plan was never fully finished. By 2015, the museum had 25 separate buildings that weren't always well connected.

The original building was soon overshadowed by the west and east wings of the southern side. These were designed by J. Cleaveland Cady in a style called Richardsonian Romanesque. This part of the museum stretches 700 feet (213.4 meters) along West 77th Street, with corner towers 150 feet (45.7 meters) tall. Its pink brownstone and granite came from quarries in New York. The southern wing has several halls of different sizes. At the ends of both wings are round, tower-like structures.

Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall

The main entrance on Central Park West is officially called the New York State Memorial to Theodore Roosevelt. It was finished by John Russell Pope in 1936. It's a large, grand monument to former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt. This hall was originally meant to be one end of a "museum walkway" through Central Park, connecting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the east, but that walkway was never built.

The memorial hall has a pink-granite front that looks like Roman arches. In front of the hall on Central Park West is a terrace 350 feet (106.7 meters) long, with steps leading up to it. The main entrance is an arch 60 feet (18.3 meters) high. Underneath the arch is a granite entryway that leads to a screen made of bronze, glass, and marble. On each side of the arch are spaces with sculptures of a bison and a bear. It's also flanked by two pairs of columns, topped with figures of American explorers John James Audubon, Daniel Boone, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark. These figures were sculpted by James Earle Fraser and are about 30 feet (9.1 meters) tall. Above the main archway, there's an inscription describing Roosevelt's achievements. The words "Truth," "Knowledge," and "Vision" are carved below this inscription.

Fraser also designed an equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt. This statue originally stood outside the memorial hall. The statue was removed in January 2022 and will be on a long-term loan to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota.

The inside of the Memorial Hall is 67 by 120 feet (20.4 by 36.6 meters) across, with a curved ceiling 100 feet (30.5 meters) tall. The ceiling has octagonal shapes, and the floors are made of mosaic marble tiles. The bottom 9 feet (2.7 meters) of the walls are covered in marble, and above that, the walls are made of limestone. The top of each wall has a marble band and a decorative border. Each of the Memorial Hall's four sides has two red-marble columns, each 48 feet (14.6 meters) tall, rising from a marble base. There are round windows high up on the north and south walls. William Andrew MacKay designed three 62-foot (18.9-meter) wide murals showing important events in Roosevelt's life: the building of the Panama Canal on the north wall, African exploration on the west wall, and the Treaty of Portsmouth on the south wall. The east and west walls have four quotes from Roosevelt under the headings "Nature," "Manhood," "Youth," and "The State."

The Memorial Hall originally connected to classrooms, exhibit rooms, and an auditorium for 600 people. There's also an entrance to the New York City Subway's 81st Street–Museum of Natural History station directly below the Memorial Hall. Today, the hall connects to the Akeley Hall of African Mammals and the Hall of Asian Mammals. The Memorial Hall has four exhibits that describe Theodore Roosevelt's work in conservation during different parts of his life.

Mammal Halls

Old World Mammals

Akeley Hall of African Mammals

The Akeley Hall of African Mammals is named after taxidermist Carl Akeley. It's a two-story hall on the second floor, just west of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. It connects to the Hall of African Peoples. The hall has 28 dioramas that show the many different ecosystems in Africa and the mammals that live there. A diorama is a scene with stuffed animals and a painted background that looks very real.

The main display in the hall is a group of eight African elephants in an 'alarmed' pose. While mammals are the main focus, birds and plants from the regions are also sometimes shown. This hall was finished in its current form in 1936.

Carl Akeley first suggested the Hall of African Mammals to the museum around 1909. He wanted to create 40 dioramas showing the landscapes and animals of Africa, which were quickly disappearing. Daniel Pomeroy, a museum trustee, offered investors a chance to join the museum's trips to Africa if they helped fund the hall. Akeley started collecting animals for the hall as early as 1909. He even met Theodore Roosevelt during a Smithsonian-Roosevelt African trip. On these early trips, Akeley was joined by his former taxidermy student, James L. Clark, and artist, William R. Leigh.

When Akeley returned to Africa to collect gorillas for the hall's first diorama, Clark stayed behind. He looked for artists to create the backgrounds for the dioramas. The way these first habitat groups looked influenced the design of other diorama halls, like Birds of the World, the Hall of North American Mammals, the Vernay Hall of Southeast Asian Mammals, and the Hall of Oceanic Life.

After Akeley's sudden death in 1926, James L. Clark took over finishing the hall. He hired architectural artist James Perry Wilson in 1933 to help Leigh paint the backgrounds. Wilson made many improvements to Leigh's methods, including ways to reduce the distortion caused by the curved walls of the dioramas. In 1936, William Durant Campbell, a wealthy board member who wanted to see Africa, offered to pay for several dioramas if he could get the animals himself. Clark agreed, and this led to getting many large animals. Kane joined Leigh, Wilson, and other artists to finish the remaining dioramas. Although the hall's construction was done in 1936, the dioramas opened gradually between the mid-1920s and early 1940s.

Hall of Asian Mammals

The Hall of Asian Mammals, also called the Vernay-Faunthorpe Hall of Asian Mammals, is just south of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. It has 8 full dioramas, 4 partial dioramas, and 6 habitat groups of mammals from India, Nepal, Burma, and Malaysia. The hall opened in 1930 and, like the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, its main feature is two Asian elephants. At one time, a giant panda and Siberian tiger were also part of the hall's collection. These animals were originally meant for a Hall of North Asian Mammals, which was planned for the spot where the Stout Hall of Asian Peoples is now. These specimens can now be seen in the Hall of Biodiversity.

Animals for the Hall of Asian Mammals were collected during six trips led by British antiques dealer Arthur S. Vernay and Col. John Faunthorpe. Vernay paid for all the trips. The first Vernay-Faunthorpe trip happened in 1922, when many animals Vernay was looking for, like the Sumatran rhinoceros and Asiatic lion, were in danger of disappearing. Vernay asked local authorities for hunting permits. In later museum trips led by Vernay, these requests helped the museum get into areas that were usually closed to foreign visitors. Artist Clarence C. Rosenkranz went on the Vernay-Faunthorpe trips as a field artist and painted most of the diorama backgrounds in the hall. These trips were also well documented with photos and videos. There was enough video from the first trip to make a full-length movie, Hunting Tigers in India (1929).

New World Mammals

Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals

The Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals is on the first floor, just west of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. It has 43 dioramas of different mammals from North America, north of tropical Mexico. Each diorama focuses on a specific animal, from very large animals to smaller rodents and meat-eaters. Some famous dioramas include the Alaskan brown bears looking at a salmon after scaring off an otter, a pair of wolves, a pair of Sonoran jaguars, and two bull Alaska moose fighting.

The Hall of North American Mammals opened in 1942 with only ten dioramas. Another 16 dioramas were added in 1963. A big renovation project started in late 2011 after a large donation from Jill and Lewis Bernard. In October 2012, the hall reopened as the Bernard Hall of North American Mammals.

Hall of Small Mammals

The Hall of Small Mammals is a smaller section connected to the Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals, just to its west. It has several small dioramas showing small mammals found across North America. These include collared peccaries, Abert's squirrel, and a wolverine.

Birds, Reptiles, and Amphibian Halls

Sanford Hall of North American Birds

The Sanford Hall of North American Birds is on the third floor, between the Hall of Primates and the second level of Akeley Hall. It has over 20 dioramas showing birds from across North America in their natural homes. At the far end of the hall are two large murals by bird expert and artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes. The hall also has displays with large collections of warblers, owls, and raptors.

This hall was thought up by museum bird expert Frank Chapman. It's named after Chapman's friend and amateur bird expert Leonard C. Sanford, who helped pay for the hall and gave his entire bird collection to the museum. Work on the hall's dioramas started as early as 1902, and the dioramas opened in 1909. They were the first dioramas shown in the museum and are the oldest still on display. The hall was updated in 1962.

Chapman was not the first to make museum dioramas, but he was the first to bring artists into the field with him. He wanted to capture a specific place at a specific time. Unlike the dramatic scenes Akeley created for the African Hall, Chapman wanted his dioramas to be scientifically accurate. He wanted them to be a historical record of habitats and species that were in danger of disappearing. Each of Chapman's dioramas showed a species, its nest, and 4 feet (1.2 meters) of the surrounding habitat in every direction.

Hall of Birds of the World

The Hall of Birds of the World is on the south side of the second floor. This hall shows the many different kinds of birds found around the globe. 12 dioramas display various ecosystems from around the world and give examples of the birds that live there. For example, there's a diorama of South Georgia with king penguins and skuas, the East African plains with secretarybirds and bustards, and the Australian outback with honeyeaters, cockatoos, and kookaburras.

Whitney Memorial Hall of Oceanic Birds

The Whitney Memorial Wing, originally named after Harry Payne Whitney, opened in 1939 and held 750,000 birds. Later known as the Hall of Oceanic Birds, it was finished and dedicated in 1953. It was started by Frank Chapman and Leonard C. Sanford, who were originally museum volunteers. They went ahead with creating a hall to show birds from the Pacific islands. The hall was designed to be a fully immersive collection of dioramas, including a circular display featuring birds-of-paradise. In 1998, the Butterfly Conservatory was put inside this hall.

Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians

The Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians is near the southeast corner of the third floor. It teaches visitors about herpetology (the study of reptiles and amphibians). Many exhibits explain how reptiles evolved, their body parts, how many different kinds there are, how they reproduce, and how they behave. Important exhibits include a group of Komodo dragons, an American alligator, Lonesome George (the last Pinta Island tortoise), and poison dart frogs.

In 1926, W. Douglas Burden, F.J. Defosse, and Emmett Reid Dunn collected Komodo Dragon specimens for the museum. Burden's chapter "The Komodo Dragon" in his book Look to the Wilderness describes the trip, the dragons' home, and their behavior. The hall opened in 1927 and was rebuilt between 1969 and 1977.

Biodiversity and Environmental Halls

Hall of Biodiversity

The Hall of Biodiversity is underneath the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. It opened in May 1998. This hall mainly has exhibits that show what biodiversity is. Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth. It also shows how living things interact and how extinction harms biodiversity. The hall includes a 2,500-square-foot (232.3-square-meter) diorama of the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve rainforest. This diorama has over 160 animal and plant species. It shows the rainforest in three ways: untouched, changed by human activity, and destroyed by human activity.

Another cool part of the hall is "The Spectrum of Habitats," a video wall showing videos of nine different ecosystems. There's also a "Transformation Wall" with information and stories about changes to biodiversity. A "Solutions Wall" gives ideas on how to help increase biodiversity.

Hall of North American Forests

The Hall of North American Forests is on the museum's first floor, between the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall and the Warburg Hall of New York State Environments. It has ten dioramas showing different types of forests from across North America. It also has displays about protecting forests and keeping trees healthy. The hall was built with the help of botanist Henry K. Svenson and opened in 1958. Each diorama clearly states the location and exact time of year it shows. The trees and plants in the dioramas are made from art supplies, but also include real bark and other pieces collected from nature. The entrance to the hall features a cross-section from the Mark Twain Tree, a 1,400-year-old sequoia from California.

Warburg Hall of New York State Environments

Warburg Hall of New York State Environments is on the museum's ground floor, between the Hall of North American Forests and the Grand Hall. It's based on the town of Pine Plains in New York. The hall shows the typical ecosystems of New York in many ways. It covers things like soil types, seasonal changes, and how both humans and animals affect the environment. It's named after the German-American giver Felix M. Warburg and opened on May 14, 1951, as the Warburg Memorial Hall of General Ecology. It hasn't changed much since then and is now often admired for its old-fashioned but modern style.

Milstein Hall of Ocean Life

The Milstein Hall of Ocean Life is in the southeast part of the first floor, west of the Hall of Biodiversity. It focuses on marine biology (the study of ocean life), ocean plants, and marine conservation (protecting the oceans). In the center of the hall is a 94-foot (28.7-meter) long model of a blue whale. The upper level of the hall shows the many different ecosystems in the ocean. Dioramas compare life in places like kelp forests, mangroves, coral reefs, and the deep ocean. It tries to show how huge and varied the oceans are while also highlighting common themes. The lower half of the hall has 15 large dioramas of bigger ocean animals. This is where the famous "Squid and the Whale" diorama is, showing a made-up fight between the two creatures. Other notable exhibits include the two-level Andros Coral Reef Diorama.

In 1910, museum president Henry F. Osborn suggested building a large section in the museum's southeast courtyard for a new Hall of Ocean Life. This hall would show "models and skeletons of whales." The hall opened in 1924 and was updated in 1962. In 1969, a renovation made the hall focus more on large ocean animals. This included adding a lifelike blue whale model to replace an older, popular steel and papier-mâché whale model. Richard Van Gelder oversaw the creation of the hall as it is today. The hall was renovated again in 2003. This time, the main focus was on environmentalism and conservation. It was renamed after developer Paul Milstein and AMNH board member Irma Milstein. The 2003 renovation included fixing up the famous blue whale, which hangs high above the 19,000-square-foot (1,765.2-square-meter) exhibit floor. It also updated the dioramas from the 1930s and 1960s and added electronic displays.

Human Origins and Cultural Halls

Cultural Halls

Stout Hall of Asian Peoples

The Stout Hall of Asian Peoples is on the museum's second floor, between the Hall of Asian Mammals and Birds of the World. It's named after Gardner D. Stout, a former museum president. Walter A. Fairservis, a long-time museum archaeologist, mostly organized it. Opened in 1980, Stout Hall is the museum's largest hall about people and cultures. It has items collected by the museum between 1869 and the mid-1970s. Many famous trips sponsored by the museum are linked to the items in the hall, including the Roy Chapman Andrews trips in Central Asia.

Stout Hall has two parts: Ancient Eurasia, a small section about how human civilization developed in Eurasia, and Traditional Asia, a much larger section with cultural items from across Asia. The Traditional Asia section is set up to match two major trade routes of the Silk Road. Like many of the museum's halls, the items in Stout Hall are shown in different ways, including exhibits, small dioramas, and five full-size dioramas. Important exhibits in the Ancient Eurasian section include copies from the old sites of Teshik-Tash and Çatalhöyük, and a full-size copy of a Hammurabi Stele. The Traditional Asia section has areas for major Asian countries like Japan, China, Tibet, and India. It also includes many smaller Asian groups like the Ainu, Semai, and Yakut.

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  A forced perspective, miniature diorama of Isfahan

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  A Yakut shaman performs a healing rite in this diorama

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  A range of costumes worn by women in Islamic Asia

Hall of African Peoples

The Hall of African Peoples is behind Akeley Hall of African Mammals and underneath Sanford Hall of North American Birds. It's organized by the four main ecosystems in Africa: River Valley, Grasslands, Forest-Woodland, and Desert. Each section shows items and exhibits from the people native to those ecosystems across Africa. The hall has three dioramas, and important exhibits include a large collection of spiritual costumes in the Forest-Woodland section.

Connecting the sections of the hall is a comparison of African societies based on hunting and gathering, farming, and raising animals. Each type of society is shown in its historical, political, spiritual, and environmental setting. A small section about the African diaspora (people of African origin living outside Africa) spread by the slave trade is also included. Tribes and civilizations featured include:

• River Valley: Ancient Egyptians, Nubians, Kuba, Lozi
• Grasslands: Pokot, Shilluk, Barawa
• Forest-Woodland: Yoruba, Kofyar, Mbuti
• Desert: Ait Atta, Tuareg

Hall of Mexico and Central America

The Hall of Mexico and Central America is on the museum's second floor, behind Birds of the World and before the Hall of South American Peoples. It shows ancient items from many pre-Columbian civilizations that once lived across Mesoamerica. These include the Maya, Olmec, Zapotec, and Aztec. Most of the written records from these civilizations didn't survive the Spanish conquest. So, the main goal of the hall is to figure out what we can know about them just from the items they left behind.

The museum has shown pre-Columbian items since it opened, not long after archaeologists discovered these civilizations. Its first hall for this topic opened in 1899. As the museum's collection grew, the hall was greatly updated in 1944 and again in 1970, when it reopened in its current form. Important items on display include the Kunz Axe and a full-size copy of Tomb 104 from the Monte Albán archaeological site. This copy was first shown at the 1939 World's Fair.

South American Peoples

The Hall of South American Peoples is on the northwest corner of the second floor, next to the Hall of Mexico and Central America. The hall first opened on the third floor in 1904. It showed archaeological items, including mummies, from Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and the West Indies. In 1931, the hall was made bigger and moved to the second floor. This was done under the direction of curators Ronald Olson and W.C. Bennett. The new hall included a copy of a Chilean copper mine. Later, a temporary hall called the Men of the Montaña showed Peruvian cultural items from the Cashibo and Panoan peoples. In 1989, the hall was updated and reopened as a permanent exhibit. It now focuses on the technology and art of ancient Andean and traditional Amazonian cultures. The Hall has about 2,300 items from various ancient South American cultures, including the Moche, Chávin, Chancay, Paracas, Nazca, and Inca. Many of the items on display come from the Roosevelt Collections, which were gathered by Theodore Roosevelt on trips to South America in the early 1900s and given to the museum.

Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples

The Hall of Pacific Peoples is on the southwest corner of the third floor, accessed through the Hall of Plains Indians. The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead started the Hall of Pacific Peoples in 1971. From the time Mead began working on the hall in 1945, she wanted to create an exhibit that would feel and sound like the Pacific regions on display. After Mead died in 1978, the hall reopened in December 1984 as the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples. The new hall, designed by Eugene Burgmann, kept the blue ocean and sky feel of the original hall. The hall was closed again in 1997 and reopened in 2001 with an updated design that kept the cultural "alcoves" first added in 1984.

The Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples has items from New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Micronesia, Melanesia, and other Pacific islands. Mead herself collected 250 of the 1,500 items in the hall. Some of these were likely chosen from the 3,284 items she collected for the American Museum of Natural History during her fieldwork in New Guinea and other Pacific islands from 1928-1939. Others, like the theater set from a puppet play in Bali, were chosen from about 600 items that Mead and her anthropologist husband Gregory Bateson sent to the museum while they were doing fieldwork in Bali from 1936-1938. The exhibits in the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples also include a fiberglass copy of an Easter Island moai statue and capes made of honeycreeper feathers.

Native American Halls

Northwest Coast Hall

The Hall of Northwest Coast Indians is on the museum's ground floor, behind the Grand Gallery and between Warburg and Spitzer Halls. It is the museum's oldest hall, started in 1899 by anthropologist Franz Boas as the Jesup North Pacific Hall. The hall now has items and exhibits from the tribes of the North Pacific Coast cultural region (Southern Alaska, Northern Washington, and part of British Columbia). Four "House Posts" from the Kwakwaka'wakw nation are featured prominently, along with murals by William S. Taylor showing native life. As of 2022, there are 9,000 items in total, including 78 totem poles. There's also a Haida canoe hanging from the ceiling (moved from the Grand Gallery in 2020). The items are explained with text in many Native American languages.

Items in the hall came from three main sources. The earliest was a gift of Haida items collected by John Wesley Powell and given by future trustee Heber R. Bishop in 1882. Next, the museum bought two collections of Tlingit items collected by Lt. George T. Emmons in 1888 and 1894. The rest of the hall's items were collected during the famous Jesup North Pacific Expedition between 1897 and 1902. Led by Boas and paid for by museum president Morris Ketchum Jesup, this trip was the first for the museum's Anthropology Division and is now seen as a very important trip in American anthropology. Many famous ethnologists took part, including George Hunt, who got the Kwakwaka'wakw House Posts in the hall. Other tribes featured in the hall include Coastal Salish, Nuu-chah-nulth, Tsimshian, and Nuxalk.

When it first opened, the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians was one of four halls about the native peoples of the United States and Canada. It was originally organized into two sections: a general area for all peoples of the region and a special area divided by tribe. This was a point of disagreement for Boas, who wanted all items in the hall to be linked to the correct tribe (like it is now). This eventually led to Boas's relationship with the museum ending. In May 2022, the hall reopened after a five-year, $19 million renovation, with over 1,000 items on display. The new display includes work from modern artists like Greg Colfax KlaWayHee and Robert Davidson.

Hall of Plains Indians

The Hall of Plains Indians is on the south side of the third floor, near the western end of the museum. This hall opened in February 1967. It mainly focuses on the people of the North American Great Plains as they lived in the mid-1800s. It shows cultures like the Blackfeet, Hidatsa, and Dakota. A very interesting item is a Folsom point found in New Mexico in 1926. This point provides evidence of how early people from Asia settled in the Americas.

Hall of Eastern Woodlands Indians

The Hall of Eastern Woodlands Indians is next to the Hall of Plains Indians, on the south side of the third floor. This hall opened in May 1966. It describes the lives and tools of traditional Native American peoples in the forest environments of eastern North America. These include Cree, Mohegan, Ojibwe, and Iroquois cultures. The exhibit shows examples of native basket weaving, pottery, farming methods, food preparation, metal jewelry, musical instruments, and textiles. Other highlights include a model of a Menominee birchbark canoe and various traditional homes like an Ojibwa domed wigwam, an Iroquois longhouse, a Creek council house, and other eastern woodland dwelling styles.

Human Origins Halls

Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins

The Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, once called The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, is on the south side of the first floor, near the western end of the museum. It opened with its current name on February 10, 2007. When it first opened in 1921, the hall was known as the "Hall of the Age of Man." It was the only major exhibit in the United States to deeply explore human evolution. The displays showed the story of Homo sapiens, explained how humans evolved, and looked at where human creativity came from.

Many of the displays from the original hall can still be seen in the expanded hall today. These include life-size dioramas of our human ancestors: Australopithecus afarensis, Homo ergaster, Neanderthal, and Cro-Magnon. These dioramas show each species doing things scientists believe they were capable of. Also on display are full-size copies of important fossils, like the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy skeleton and the 1.7-million-year-old Turkana Boy. There are also Homo erectus specimens, including a copy of Peking Man. The hall also features copies of ice age art found in France. The limestone carvings of horses were made almost 26,000 years ago and are thought to be some of the earliest human artistic expressions.

Earth and Planetary Science Halls

Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites

The Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites is on the southwest corner of the first floor. It has some of the best meteorite samples in the world. This includes Ahnighito, a piece of the 200-ton Cape York meteorite. This meteorite was first known to non-Inuit cultures when they explored Meteorite Island, Greenland. Its huge weight, 34 tons, makes it the largest one displayed in the Northern Hemisphere. It's supported by columns that go through the floor and into the solid rock beneath the museum.

The hall also has tiny diamonds, called extra-solar nanodiamonds, that are more than 5 billion years old. These were taken from a meteorite sample using chemicals. They are so small that a quadrillion (a million billion) of them can fit into a space smaller than a cubic centimeter.

Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals

The Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals (formerly the Harry Frank Guggenheim Hall of Gems and Minerals) is on the first floor, north of the Ross Hall of Meteorites. It holds thousands of rare gems, mineral samples, and pieces of jewelry. The halls closed in 2017 for a $32 million redesign and reopened to the public in June 2021. The new exhibits use modern ideas in exhibit design. They focus on telling stories, letting visitors interact, and connecting ideas across different subjects. The halls explore topics like how different mineral species developed over Earth's history, plate tectonics, and the stories of specific gems.

The halls display rare samples chosen from the museum's collection of over 100,000 pieces. These include the Star of India, the Patricia Emerald, and the DeLong Star Ruby.

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  Assorted faceted and polished minerals

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  Labradorite specimen

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  Quartz var. agate geode

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  Microcline specimen

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  Quartz var. amethyst geode

David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth

The David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth is on the first floor at the northeast corner of the museum. Opened in 1999, it's a permanent hall about the history of Earth. It covers everything from how Earth formed to the beginning of life and how humans affect the planet today. The hall was designed to answer five main questions: "How has Earth evolved? Why are there ocean basins, continents, and mountains? How do scientists read rocks? What causes climate and climate change? Why is Earth a good place for life?" The hall features rocks and other items collected during 28 trips. The oldest rock is 4.3 billion years old, while the youngest was collected from a volcano on the day it hardened. There's also a 30-seat granite amphitheater with a globe in the center of the hall.

Several sections also discuss the study of Earth systems, including geology (study of Earth's structure), glaciology (study of glaciers), atmospheric sciences (study of the atmosphere), and volcanology (study of volcanoes). The exhibit has several large rock samples you can touch. The hall features striking samples of banded iron and deformed conglomerate rocks, as well as granites, sandstones, lavas, and three black smokers (underwater hot springs). The north section of the hall, which mainly deals with plate tectonics (how Earth's crust moves), is arranged to look like the Earth's structure. The core and mantle are in the center, and mountain ranges are on the outside.

Fossil Halls

Fossil Storage

Most of the museum's collections of mammal and dinosaur fossils are not seen by the public. They are kept in many storage areas deep inside the museum complex. The most important storage building is the ten-story Childs Frick Building, which was built between 1969 and 1973. When the Frick Building was finished, the museum's collection of fossilized mammals and dinosaurs was the largest in the world, weighing 600 short tons (544.3 metric tons). The top three floors of the Frick Building have laboratories and offices.

Other parts of the museum also store ancient life. The Whale Bone Storage Room is a huge space where powerful machines from the ceiling move giant fossil bones. The museum attic upstairs has even more storage, like the Elephant Room, while the tusk vault and boar vault are downstairs from the attic.

Public Displays

The amazing fossil collections that are open to the public are on the entire fourth floor of the museum. You get to the fourth floor exhibits through the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Orientation Center, which opened in 1996. On the 77th Street side of the museum, visitors start in the Orientation Center and follow a carefully marked path. This path takes visitors along an evolutionary tree of life. As the tree "branches," visitors see how different vertebrates are related, which is called cladograms. A video on the museum's fourth floor introduces visitors to the idea of a cladogram.

Many of the fossils on display are unique and important pieces. They were collected during the museum's "golden era" of worldwide trips (1880s–1930s). On a smaller scale, trips continue today and have added to the collections from Vietnam, Madagascar, South America, and central and eastern Africa.

Halls

The first dinosaur hall in the museum opened in 1905. The 4th floor includes these halls:

• Hall of Vertebrate Origins
• Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs (recognized by their grasping hand, long mobile neck, and the downward/forward position of the pubis bone, they are forerunners of the modern bird)
• Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs
• Hall of Primitive Mammals
• Hall of Advanced Mammals

The dinosaur halls were temporarily closed for renovation starting in 1990. The first halls to reopen were the primitive-mammal and advanced-mammal halls, part of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives, which opened in 1994. The Halls of Saurischian Dinosaurs and Ornithischian Dinosaurs reopened in 1995 as part of a $12 million expansion. The Hall of Vertebrate Origins opened in 1996.

Fossils on Display

The fossils on display include:

• Tyrannosaurus rex: This skeleton is almost entirely made of real fossil bones. It's posed in a horizontal stalking position, balanced on strong legs. The specimen is actually made of fossil bones from two T. rex skeletons found in Montana in 1902 and 1908 by the famous dinosaur hunter Barnum Brown.
• Mammuthus: Larger than its relative the woolly mammoth, these fossils are from an animal that lived 11,000 years ago in Indiana.
• Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus: This giant specimen was found at the end of the 1800s. Most of its fossil bones are real, but the skull is not, because none was found at the site. The skeleton is mostly made of specimen AMNH 460, as well as specimens AMNH 222, AMNH 339, AMNH 592, and copies of the Brontosaurus excelsus holotype YPM 1980. It was many years later that the first Apatosaurus skull was found. So, a plaster copy of that skull was made and put on the museum's display. A Camarasaurus skull had been used by mistake until the correct skull was found. It's not completely certain if this specimen is a Brontosaurus or an Apatosaurus, so it's considered an "unidentified apatosaurine". It could even be its own type of dinosaur.
• Brontops: An extinct mammal distantly related to the horse and rhinoceros. It lived 35 million years ago in what is now South Dakota. It's known for its amazing and unusual pair of horns.
• A skeleton of Edmontosaurus annectens, a large plant-eating ornithopod dinosaur. This specimen is an example of a "mummified" dinosaur fossil. This means that the soft tissue and skin impressions were preserved in the surrounding rock. The specimen is displayed as it was found, lying on its side with its legs pulled up and head bent backward.
• On September 26, 2007, an 80-million-year-old, 2-foot (61-centimeter) wide fossil of an ammonite was shown for the first time at the museum. This fossil is made entirely of the gemstone ammolite. Neil Landman, curator of fossil invertebrates, explained that ammonites (shelled cephalopod mollusks) died out 66 million years ago, in the same event that killed the dinosaurs. Korite International gave the fossil to the museum after it was found in Alberta, Canada.
• One skeleton of an Allosaurus eating from a Brontosaurus body. This is based on fossils found at Bone Cabin Quarry that show large bite marks on Apatosaurine vertebrae.
• The only known skull of Andrewsarchus mongoliensis.
• A display of different kinds of ground sloths, including Megalocnus rodens, Scelidotherium cuvieri, Megalonyx wheatleyi, and Glossotherium robustus.

A Triceratops and a Stegosaurus are also on display, among many other specimens.

Besides the fossils on display, many more are stored in the collections for scientists to study. These include important specimens like a complete diplodocid skull, tyrannosaurid teeth, sauropod vertebrae, and many holotypes (the original specimen used to describe a new species).

Rose Center for Earth and Space

The Hayden Planetarium, connected to the museum, is now part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space on the north side of the museum. The first Hayden Planetarium was started in 1933 with a donation from Charles Hayden. It opened in 1935. The AMNH announced the modern Rose Center for Earth and Space in early 1995, and old buildings were torn down that same year.

The Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space was finished in 2000. It cost $210 million. Designed by James Stewart Polshek, the new building is a six-story glass cube. Inside, there's an 87-foot (26.5-meter) illuminated sphere that looks like it's floating, but it's actually held up by a metal frame. Polshek has called his work a "cosmic cathedral." The sphere is known as the Space Theater.

The facility has 333,500 square feet (30,983 square meters) of space for research, education, and exhibits, as well as the Hayden Planetarium. Also in the facility is the Department of Astrophysics, the newest science research department in the museum. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Polshek also designed the 1,800-square-foot (167.2-square-meter) Weston Pavilion, a 43-foot (13.1-meter) tall clear glass structure on the museum's west side. This smaller building, a companion to the Rose Center, offers a new entrance to the museum and more exhibit space for items related to space. The Heilbrun Cosmic Pathway is one of the most popular exhibits in the Rose Center.

Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation

Designed by Studio Gang and landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand, the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation opened in May 2023. This 230,000-square-foot (21,368-square-meter) addition has six floors above ground and one below. The Gilder Center welcomes visitors with a new, easy-to-access entrance on Columbus Avenue. This entrance connects to a central five-story atrium and creates more than 30 connections to the older parts of the museum. The atrium's design is inspired by natural processes like how wind and water shape landscapes. To create its smooth, curved look, the atrium was built using a special concrete spray technique called shotcrete. The curved outside of the building looks different from the older styles of the museum, but its Milford Pink granite covering is the same stone used on the Museum's west side.

The Richard Gilder Center has new exhibit areas for insects, including an insectarium (a place for insects) and a butterfly vivarium (a place where animals live in natural conditions). In the vivarium, visitors can walk among hundreds of live butterflies fluttering in a lush tropical setting. It also includes a visible storage area that shows scientific specimens. There's an expanded research library, classrooms, education areas, and laboratories. Another permanent feature is an immersive and interactive video experience called “Invisible Worlds.” This focuses on the important, often hard-to-see connections that support life, such as how brain cells fire, how nutrients and water are exchanged between tree roots, and the tiny world of plankton in ocean ecosystems.

This expansion was originally planned to be north of the existing museum, taking up parts of Theodore Roosevelt Park. However, due to opposition to building in the park, the expansion was moved to the west side of the museum, and its size was reduced. The new section replaced three existing museum buildings along Columbus Avenue.

Exhibitions Lab

Started in 1869, the AMNH Exhibitions Lab has created thousands of displays. This department is known for putting new scientific research into immersive art and multimedia presentations. Besides the famous dioramas at its home museum and the Rose Center for Earth and Space, the lab has also created international exhibits and software like the Digital Universe Atlas.

The exhibitions team currently has over sixty artists, writers, preparators, designers, and programmers. The department is responsible for creating two to three exhibits each year. These large shows often travel to other natural history museums across the country. They have produced, among others, the first exhibits to discuss Darwinian evolution, human-caused climate change, and the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, caused by an asteroid.

Research Library

The Research Library is open to staff and public visitors. It's on the fourth floor of the museum. The Library collects materials on subjects like mammalogy (study of mammals), earth and planetary science, astronomy and astrophysics, anthropology (study of human cultures), entomology (study of insects), herpetology (study of reptiles and amphibians), ichthyology (study of fish), paleontology (study of fossils), ethology (study of animal behavior), ornithology (study of birds), mineralogy (study of minerals), invertebrates (animals without backbones), systematics (classifying living things), ecology (study of how living things interact with their environment), oceanography (study of oceans), conchology (study of shells), exploration and travel, history of science, museology (study of museums), bibliography (lists of books), genomics (study of genes), and related biological sciences. The collection has many old materials, some from the 15th century, that are hard to find elsewhere.

In its early years, the Library grew mostly through gifts. These included John Clarkson Jay's shell library, Carson Brevoort's library on fish and general zoology, Daniel Giraud Elliot's bird library, S. Lowell Elliot's collection of books and pamphlets, Harry Edwards's insect library, the Hugh Jewett collection of voyages and travel, and Jules Marcou's geology collection. In the 1900s, the library continued to grow with donations from people and groups like Egbert Viele, the American Ethnological Society, Joel Asaph Allen, Hermon Carey Bumpus, and Henry Fairfield Osborn.

The new Library was designed by the firm Roche-Dinkeloo in 1992. The space is 55,000 square feet (5,109.7 square meters) and includes five different "conservation zones." These include a reading room for 50 people, public offices, and rooms with controlled temperature and humidity. Today, the Library's collections have over 550,000 volumes of books, journals, pamphlets, reprints, microforms, and original illustrations. It also has film, photographs, archives and manuscripts, fine art, memorabilia, and rare book collections.

Special collections include:

• Institutional Archives, Manuscripts, and Personal Papers: This includes old documents, field notebooks, clippings, and other papers about the museum, its scientists and staff, scientific trips and research, museum exhibits, education, and general management.
• Art and Memorabilia Collection.
• Moving Image Collection (films and videos).
• Vertical Files: Related to exhibits, expeditions, and museum operations.

Activities

Research Activities

The museum has a scientific staff of more than 225 people. It also sponsors over 120 special field trips each year. Many of the fossils on display are unique and historic pieces collected during the museum's "golden era" of worldwide expeditions (1880s–1930s). Examples of some of these trips, paid for fully or partly by the AMNH, are: Jesup North Pacific Expedition, the Whitney South Seas Expedition, the Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition, the Crocker Land Expedition, and trips to Madagascar and New Guinea by Richard Archbold. Smaller trips continue today. The museum also publishes several scientific journals, including the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

Southwestern Research Station

The AMNH runs a biological field station in Portal, Arizona, in the Chiricahua Mountains. The Southwestern Research Station was started in 1955. It was bought with money from David Rockefeller, and entomologist Mont Cazier was its first director. The station is in a "biodiversity hotspot" (an area with many different species). It's used by researchers and students and sometimes offers classes to the public.

Educational Outreach

The AMNH's education programs include reaching out to schools in New York City with the Moveable Museum. The AMNH offers many different educational programs, camps, and classes for students from pre-kindergarten to post-graduate levels. The AMNH supports the Lang Science Program, which is a full research and science education program for 5th–12th graders. It also has the Science Research Mentorship Program (SRMP), where pairs of students do a full year of intense original research with an AMNH scientist. As of 2023, about 400,000 schoolchildren visit the AMNH on field trips each year. Most students visit for a day or less, but since late 2023, the museum has also offered a weeklong educational program called Beyond Elementary Explorations in Science.

Richard Gilder Graduate School

On October 23, 2006, the museum started the Richard Gilder Graduate School. This made it the first American museum to give out doctoral degrees (PhDs) in its own name. The school is named after businessman Richard Gilder, who gave $50 million to the school. The school was officially recognized in 2009. In 2011, it had 11 students who worked closely with curators and could use the museum's collections. The first seven graduates received their degrees in 2013. The AMNH offers a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) in Earth Science and a PhD in Comparative Biology.

The MAT Earth Science Residency program started in 2012 to help with a big shortage of qualified science teachers in New York state. In 2015, the MAT program officially joined the Richard Gilder Graduate School. The New York State Board of Regents allowed the Gilder School to grant the MAT degree.

Notable People

Presidents

The museum's first three presidents were all co-founders. John David Wolfe served from 1869 until he died in 1872. He was followed by Robert L. Stuart, who resigned in 1881. The third president, Morris K. Jesup, was president for over 25 years, serving until he died in 1908. When he died, Jesup left $1 million to the museum.

The fourth president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, took over after Jesup died. He helped the museum expand and grow even more. After Osborn resigned in 1933, F. Trubee Davison became the AMNH's fifth president. Davison stepped down in 1951, and Alexander M. White was chosen as the museum's president. Gardner D. Stout then served as president from 1968 to 1975, when Robert Guestier Goelet was chosen in his place. Goelet served until 1987, when he joined the board of trustees. He was followed by George D. Langdon Jr., who was the first president in the museum's history to receive a salary. All previous presidents had worked without pay.

Ellen V. Futter became the museum's first female president in 1993. Futter announced in June 2022 that she planned to step down when the Gilder Center opened in March 2023. Sean M. Decatur was named as Futter's replacement in December 2022. He became the first African American president of the museum on April 3, 2023.

Other Famous Names

Famous people connected to the museum include the dinosaur-hunter of the Gobi Desert, Roy Chapman Andrews (who helped inspire the character Indiana Jones); photographer Yvette Borup Andrews; George Gaylord Simpson; biologist Ernst Mayr; pioneering cultural anthropologists Franz Boas and Margaret Mead; explorer and geographer Alexander H. Rice Jr.; and bird expert Robert Cushman Murphy.

Surroundings

The museum is at 79th Street and Central Park West. There's a direct entrance into the museum from the New York City Subway's 81st Street–Museum of Natural History station, served by the B and ​C train.

Outside the museum's Columbus Avenue entrance, there's a stainless steel time capsule. It was created after a design competition won by Santiago Calatrava. The capsule was sealed at the beginning of 2000 to mark the start of the 3rd millennium. It looks like a folded, saddle-shaped object, symmetrical on many sides, that explores the shapes of folded round frames. Calatrava described it as "a flower." The capsule is meant to be opened in the year 3000.

The museum is in a 17-acre (6.9-hectare) city park called Theodore Roosevelt Park. This park stretches from Central Park West to Columbus Avenue, and from West 77th to 81st Streets. It has park benches, gardens, lawns, and a dog run. On the west side of the park, between 80th and 81st Streets near Columbus Avenue, is the Nobel Monument, honoring Nobel Prize winners from the United States.

Images for kids

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  Bengal tiger at the American Museum of Natural History

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  Diorama in Akeley Hall of African Mammals

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  Diorama in Akeley Hall of African Mammals

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  Diorama in Akeley Hall of African Mammals

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  Butterfly Conservatory

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  Display in Milstein Hall of Ocean Life

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  Tibetan Vajrapani statue

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  Tibetan Kalachakra statue

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  The museum's south range, and some of the west façade, in the 1920s

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  American bison and pronghorn diorama (right)

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  Night view of the museum, looking northwest from across Central Park West

See Also

In Spanish: Museo Americano de Historia Natural para niños

• List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City
• List of most-visited museums in the United States
• List of New York City Designated Landmarks in Manhattan from 59th to 110th Streets
• National Register of Historic Places listings in Manhattan from 59th to 110th Streets
• Education in New York City
• Margaret Mead Film Festival
• Constantin Astori