American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History is located in Manhattan's Upper West Side in New York, USA, at 79th Street and Central Park West. The Museum is famous for its wide variety of cultural, scientific, and zoological exhibits.

History and Architecture

The Museum was founded in 1869. Its first home was the Arsenal building in Central Park. In 1874, ground was broken for the present building, which occupies most of Manhattan Square. The original neo-Gothic range (1874–1877), by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, who were collaborating with Frederick Law Olmsted in structures for Central Park, was soon eclipsed by the south range of the museum, by J. Cleaveland Cady, a robust exercise in rusticated brownstone neo-Romanesque.

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.

Collections and Exhibits

• The Museum is famous for its habitat groups of African, Asian and North American mammals, including a full-size model of a Blue Whale suspended in the hall of oceans.
• The circuit of a complete floor is devoted to vertebrate evolution, including the world-famous dinosaurs.
• A 62-foot carved and painted Haida war canoe from the Pacific Northwest is on display.
• The Museum also houses the "Star of India", the largest blue sapphire in the world.
• 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.

Luminaries and Supporters

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, Ernst Mayr and pioneer cultural anthropologists, Franz Boas and Margaret Mead and Ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy. J. P. Morgan was among famous benefactors of the Museum.

Directions

The museum can be easily reached by the B and C lines of the New York City subway, via a subway stop directly adjacent to the museum.

Recent News & Events

Exhibition of Live Butterflies at The American Museum of Natural History
The annual exhibit "The Butterfly Conservatory: Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter"