Chartered in 1869, the American Museum of Natural History holds tens of millions of specimens and artifacts across 45 permanent exhibition halls.
The complex spans multiple connected buildings and can easily take a full day to see properly, so pick up a map at the entrance and plan a route in advance.
The museum is not one building but twenty-one interconnected ones holding forty-five permanent halls, which explains why the floor plan misbehaves — corridors change level, and a hall can only be reached from one direction. Legislation creating the museum was signed on April 6, 1869; it opened in the Arsenal in Central Park on May 22, 1871 and moved into its own structure on December 22, 1877. Everything since has been stitched onto that spine, most recently the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, which opened on May 4, 2023 and finally connected several previously dead-ended wings.
The dioramas are the reason to come, and they are historical documents as much as natural history. The Akeley Hall of African Mammals, named for the taxidermist Carl Akeley and completed in its present form in 1936, holds twenty-eight dioramas around a central herd of eight elephants. What is preserved there is a particular 1930s idea of how to make an animal legible — the painted horizon, the foreground grasses cast from real plants, the single frozen instant.
The blue whale in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life is ninety-four feet long and went on display in 1969, built from photographs of a female found dead in 1925. The 2003 renovation corrected it against footage of live whales: the bulging eyes were flattened, the blowholes redesigned, the tail tapered, and a navel added roughly four-fifths of the way down the body, which the original preparators had forgotten.
The fourth-floor fossil halls were reorganized in 1995 from a walk-through-time into a branching path based on cladistics, so the route itself carries the argument — each fork marks a shared trait. Entering from the wrong end reverses the logic, which is the single most common way visitors lose the thread.
200 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024 · Official site ↗
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 21 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain about 32 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum occupies more than 2,500,000 ft2 (232,258 m2). AMNH has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, and averages about five million visits annually.
This background summary is from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The editorial on this page is ours.