Princess on the Road

Natural history museums are my favourite because they always have something that really tickles my bookish nerdiness - dinosaur bones.  And the American Museum of Natural History had plenty of these, along with some other really cool stuff.

 

I devoted all of Thursday to AMNH because it has 4 floors jam packed with exhibits.  I arrived early and good thing too – there were some serious crowds, mostly screaming children and their screaming parents who screamed all day at each other and got in my way when I was trying to take photos.  The AMNH also has a planetarium, Hayden Planetarium Space Theatre, with several shows throughout the day.  You need to book when you purchase your ticket and it is popular so I decided to do that first and get it out of the way.

 

The scheduled show was called Journey to the Stars and was an easy going film  narrated by Whoopi Goldberg.  The Planetarium was huge, which was lucky because it meant I could sit as far away as possible from the screaming children.  After the show, I started to make my way around the first floor.  Although photos were allowed, most of the exhibits were quite dark making photos difficult even with a flash.  The first floor is the largest floor with the most exhibits.  My favourites included:

• Hall of Biodiversity: a look at the negative impact of humans on the Earth and the ways in which positive action is being taken as well as an overview of flora and fauna groups
• Milstein Hall of Ocean Life: huge gallery that includes a life-size model of a Blue Whale and exhibits all aspects of the ocean from the sea shore to the deep ocean
• Ross Hall of Meteorites: an interesting display that includes various pieces of meteorites and other space junk collected from all over the world
• North American Forests: a look at the various types of forest vegetation found throughout North America and included the stump of a huge Californian Sequoia which was about 6000 years old when cut

 

After about 3 hours on the first floor, I found the second and third floors a little stuffy.  These floors focused on the people and animals from each of the continents.  Although somewhat interesting, the exhibits looked tired and old compared to the galleries on the first floor.

 

 

 

 

The fourth floor had the really cool stuff – dinosaur bones.  The galleries were set up in a manner so that galleries were viewed in order of ages – so vertebrate first then dinosaurs and then mammals.  I thought it was very well done and there was plenty of natural light, which made photos much easier (minus the thousands of people).

 

Like the day before, I had decided to walk and the AMNH is a few blocks south of the the Met but on the west side of Central Park so I didn’t need to cross the Park.  So another 7km hike plus walking around the floors of the museum.  Totally rooted after that.

 

Peace out.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 11:52 pm and is filed under USA Trip '09. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.