American Museum of Natural History

American Museum of Natural History, the largest natural history museum in the world, located in New York. Occupying several blocks, the museum's 25 interconnected buildings house 45 exhibition halls, various research laboratories, teaching facilities, and a natural history library containing more than 450,000 volumes. The combined floor space of the American Museum and the adjacent Rose Center for Earth and Space totals more than 148,645 sq m (1,600,000 sq ft).

Since 1871 the museum has sponsored more than 1,000 scientific expeditions worldwide, amassing a collection of over 32 million specimens and artefacts. Its exhibitions explore anthropology, archaeology, geology, mineralogy, palaeontology, and biology. Notable anthropological halls include the Hall of South American Peoples, Hall of Asian Peoples, Hall of African Peoples, the Hall of Pacific Peoples, the Hall of Mexico and Central America, and two halls devoted to the indigenous peoples of North America.

The Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins examines the heritage human beings share with other living things, traces the complex pattern of human evolution, and explores the qualities that make human beings unique. This is the only major exhibition in the United States to investigate in depth the mysteries of human evolution.

A number of displays depicting species in their natural habitats appears in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, the Hall of Oceanic Birds, the Hall of North American Mammals, and the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, which contains a 28.7-m (94-ft) replica of a blue whale. This model is the largest of its type in the world.

The fossil halls, covering dinosaurs and fossils, draw on more than a century of research by the museum's scientists to tell the story of the evolution of vertebrates. The museum holds over 600 dinosaur specimens.

One of the most popular sections of the American Museum of Natural History is the Rose Center for Earth and Space, which houses exhibitions on astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, and geology. It was opened in 2000 and includes the New Hayden Planetarium. The planetarium, which includes a virtual reality computer simulator, is housed in the Hayden Sphere—a 26.5-m (87-ft) diameter aluminium sphere that also houses an exhibition depicting the Big Bang. This sphere replaced the old Hayden Planetarium that operated on the site between 1935 and 1997.

The American Museum of Natural History was founded in 1869 by a group of public-spirited Americans led by Albert S. Bickmore, the founding president. It was first housed in a Central Park building known as the Arsenal, and moved to its present site in 1877. The original American Museum-Hayden Planetarium was completed in 1935, and another notable addition, the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Building, was completed in 1936. The museum receives financial support from the city of New York.

Reviewed by: American Museum of Natural History