American Museum of Natural History

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
This article has been tagged since December 2006.

Central Park entrance to the museum

Main Lobby

The American Museum of Natural History is a landmark on the Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, USA. The museum has a scientific staff of more than 200, and sponsors over 100 special field expeditions each year.[1]

1 History
2 Features
- 2.1 Human Biology and Evolution
3 Access
4 Research
5 The museum in popular culture
6 Images
7 See also
8 Footnotes
9 External links

[edit] History

The Museum was founded in 1869 and housed in the old Arsenal building in Central Park. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of the 26th U.S. President, was a co-founder. The Roosevelt family had a very close connection to the museum, a common theme on the museum's murals is the many endevours of President Roosevelt, including his African hunting expedition and the construction of the Panama canal. The founding of the Museum realized the dream of naturalist Dr. Albert S. Bickmore.

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, influenced by 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.

The Allosaurus Skeleton in the Main Lobby

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.^{[citation needed]}

Famous names associated with AMNH include 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.

[edit] Features

The Museum boasts habitat groups of African, Asian and North American mammals, the full-size model of a Blue Whale suspended in the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life (reopened in 2003), the 62-foot Haida carved and painted war canoe from the Pacific Northwest, and the "Star of India", the largest blue sapphire in the world. The circuit of an entire 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.

[edit] Human Biology and Evolution

Side entrance of the museum

The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution[2], 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 Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, opened on February 10, 2007.

[edit] Access

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.

[edit] Research

Areas of their special research projects include:

Anthropology
Paleontology
Informatics
Conservation of biodiversity
Vertebrate zoology, including
Invertebrate zoology
Genomics (Institute for Comparative Genomics)
Physical sciences
- Astrophysics (The Hayden Planetarium)
- Earth & Planetary Sciences

[edit] The museum in popular culture

In J.D. Salinger's book The Catcher in the Rye, the protagonist Holden Caulfield at one point finds himself heading towards the museum, reflecting on past visits and remarking that what he likes is the permanence of the exhibits there.
On early seasons of Friends, Ross Geller worked at the museum.
The museum in the film Night at the Museum is based on the AMNH. The interior scenes were shot at a sound stage in Vancouver, Canada, but exterior shots of the museum's façade were done at the AMNH. Museum officials have credited the film for increasing the number of visitors during the holiday season in 2006 by almost 20%. According to a museum official, there were 50,000 more visits during the period December 22, 2006 to January 2, 2007 over the previous year.^[1]
The museum has appeared repeatedly in the fiction of dark fantasy author Caitlín R. Kiernan, including appearances in her fifth novel Daughter of Hounds, her work on the DC/Vertigo comic book The Dreaming (#47, "Trinket"), and many of her short stories, including "Valentia" and "Onion" (both collected in To Charles Fort, With Love, 2005).
The museum is a favorite setting in many Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child novels, including Relic, Reliquary, The Cabinet of Curiosities, and The Book of the Dead. F.B.I. Special Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast plays a major role in all of these thrillers.
The title of Noah Baumbach's 2005 film The Squid and the Whale IMDB entry refers to a diorama in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. The diorama is shown at the end of the film.
Other novels in which the AMNH is featured include Murder at the Museum of Natural History by Michael Jahn (1994), Funny Bananas: The Mystery in the Museum by Georgess McHargue (1975), and a brief scene in Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem (1999).

[edit] Images

Museum exterior	Diorama Mammals	Diorama Mammals	Diorama Birds
Diorama Mammals	Sperm Whale	Study of the ocean	Anatotitan skeletons
Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs	Planetarium	Culture Hall Exhibit	Butterfly Exhibit