American Museum of Natural History

This past week, I have been working a lot for the census. Since I had off on Friday, I went to visit the AMNH. One of my cousins was visiting NYC this week on a class trip, so I got to see him as well. The AMNH is huge! I spent many hours there and still did not see everything. I did get to see the current IMAX show on the sturgeon living (for now) in the Great Lakes, which was an interesting show (a preview is available on the AMNH website).

I started in the geological/earth science area. There were many displays showing how scientists track climate change and the speed at which global warming is affecting the earth. I was happy to see a large ice core because I had never seen one before. It was preserved in a special chilled chamber.
Here is a close up of a section of the ice core. The annual layers are really clear. So cool!

Here I am with one of the huge polished rocks in the background.

Here is a stromatolite, another object I had seen in pictures but never in real life. They cut it open so people could see the layers of bacteria mats that built up to form this large stromatolite. What an interesting remnant of early life on earth.

Banded iron formation: this is a rock that was formed long ago. It records when iron oxide starts appearing on earth in large quantities, which is used as a marker of early oxygen on earth (needed to turn iron into iron oxide).

It was nice to see my cousin Nathan for a couple hours. He was visiting with his school, all the way from Tallahassee. Here we are in the main entrance hall, with one of the dinosaur skeletons (I think it is probably a cast of the original, actually).

There were many many many skeletons and stuffed animals from all over the world, past and present. I generally prefer the skeletons myself, although the landscapes they place the stuffed animals in are interesting and show the diversity of life and landscapes on the earth very effectively. This is a giant prehistoric fish. I think the glass cases in this room were about 7 feet tall, for scale.

Here is another skeleton I really liked. It is a giant prehistoric sea turtle that was suspended from the ceiling. It is about the size of a large Galapagos tortise.

There was also a section in the museum about human evolution. There were many skeleton casts, as well as artist's reconstructions of what some of these species may have looked like. This couple are Australopithecines. The number of school children standing in front of this case giggling was astounding.

This skull, discovered on the island of Flores, has been studied extensively by someone in my department since it's discovery a few year ago. I did not realize that it had made it into permanent museum displays at the large US institutions yet, but here it is. Yay for the hobbit!

These next few pictures are early representations of humans and animals from Europe. When teaching this material, I have had trouble tracking down good images of some of these artifacts. So I took pictures of many of them (many more than are pictured here) for later use. Plus, they are interesting figurines.

This carving is much larger than I had previously thought (about 4 feet tall).

This huge tree section was interesing because along with the dates painted on the rings, important historical events were also noted to add contextual information. The tree started growing around 550AD and was cut down in the 1800s.

I ended my tour of the museum by looking at a few more fossils. This is an ancient horseshoe crab, which isn't so striking in itself. (The crab is about as large as my hand.) What is unique about this fossil is the preserved trail of the crab (the lighter path on the rock).