American Museum of Natural History

Central Park entrance to the museum

Main lobby

The American Museum of Natural History is a landmark of Manhattan’s Upper West Side in New York, USA, at 79th Street and Central Park West. The museum has a staff of more than 1,200, and it sponsors over 100 special field expeditions each year.Contents [hide]

History

The Museum was founded in 1869. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of the 26th US President, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of the founders.

The Museum’s first home was the old Arsenal building in Central Park. In 1874, ground was broken for H. H. Richardson. A triumphal Roman entrance on Central Park West, (see illustration) completed by John Russell Pope in 1936, is an overscaled Beaux-Arts monument to Teddy Roosevelt. It leads to a vast Roman basilica, where the skeleton of a rearing Barosaurus defending her young from an Allosaurus, is not lost in the general monumentality.

On October 29, 1964, the Star of India along with several other precious gems, including the Eagle Diamond and the de Long Ruby were stolen from the museum by several thieves including Jack Murphy, who gained entrance by climbing through a bathroom window they had unlocked hours before the museum was closed. The Star of India and other gems were later recovered from a locker in a Miami bus station, but the Eagle Diamond seems to have been recut and lost.

Famous names associated with AMNH have been the paleontologist and geologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, president for many years; the dinosaur-hunter of the Gobi Desert, Roy Chapman Andrews (one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones), George Gaylord Simpson, biologist Ernst Mayr, pioneer cultural anthropologists Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, and ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy. J. P. Morgan was among famous benefactors of the Museum.

Features

The Museum is famous for its habitat groups of African, Asian and North American mammals, for the full-size model of a Blue Whale suspended in the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life (reopened in 2003), for the 62-foot Haida carved and painted war canoe from the Pacific Northwest, and for the “Star of India”, the largest blue sapphire in the world. The circuit of a complete floor is devoted to vertebrate evolution, including the world-famous dinosaurs.

The Museum’s anthropological collections are also outstanding: Halls of Asian Peoples and of Pacific Peoples, of Man in Africa, Native Americans in the United States collections, general Native American collections, and collections from Mexico and Central America.

The Hayden Planetarium, connected to the museum, is now part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, housed in a glass cube containing the spherical Space Theater, designed by James Stewart Polshek. The Center was opened February 19, 2000.

Human Biology and Evolution

The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution[1], originally known under the name “Hall of the Age of Man”, was located on the first floor of the museum. It was the only major exhibit in the United States to present an in-depth investigation of human evolution. The displays traced the story of Homo sapiens, displayed the path of human evolution and examined the origins of human creativity.

The hall featured four life-size dioramas of the human predecessors Australopithecus afarensis, Homo ergaster, Neanderthal, and Cro-Magnon, showing each species in its habitat and demonstrating the behaviors and capabilities that scientists believe it had. Also displayed were full-sized casts of important fossils, including the four-million-year-old “Lucy” skeleton and the 1.7-million-year-old “Turkana Boy,” and Homo erectus specimens including a cast of “Peking Man.”

The hall also featured replicas of Ice Age art found in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. The limestone carvings of horses were made nearly 26,000 years ago and are considered to represent the earliest artistic expression of humans.

This hall is now permanently closed. Its replacement, the Hall of Human Origins, will be opening around November 2006.

Last 5 posts in Museums in New York

• American Folk Art Museum: New York
• American Museum of the Moving Image: New York
• New Museum of Contemporary Art: New York
• Noguchi Museum: New York
• Contemporary Art Center
• Rubin Museum of Art: New York
• Municipal Art Society: New York
• Museum for African Art: New York
• Museum of Biblical Art: New York
• Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art: New York