Our Family Adventure To The American Museum of Natural History was our girls’ bucket list a couple years ago and we were excited to have had friends join in the fun. The train was the most requested form of transportation for our adventure so to Grand Central Station we arrived, ready for our fun learning day. It was quite the adventure figuring the bus versus subway schedule and stops but after plenty of laughter and asking around, we made it to the museum to our girls’ relief.
The American Museum of Natural History is one of the world’s preeminent scientific and cultural institutions. Since its founding in 1869, the Museum has advanced its global mission to discover, interpret, and disseminate information about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe through a wide-ranging program of scientific research, education, and exhibition.
The Museum is renowned for its exhibitions and scientific collections, which serve as a field guide to the entire planet and present a panorama of the world’s cultures. Our family trip to the American Museum of Natural History started in the Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals. Each of the 43 dioramas in the stunningly restored Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals offers a snapshot of North America’s rich environmental heritage.
The hall, which first opened in 1942, focuses on 46 mammal species ranging from the nine-banded armadillo to the white-tailed deer, and its dioramas are widely considered the finest in the world. The team of artists, conservators, taxidermists, and designers who worked to re-color faded fur, dust delicate leaves, and selectively restore the background paintings did a phenomenal job as it was a joy to see the wonder through our girls’ eyes.
Our Family Adventure To The American Museum of Natural History continued into the Stout Hall of Asian Peoples. The Gardner D. Stout Hall of Asian Peoples—the Museum’s largest cultural hall—showcases some of the finest collections in Asian ethnology in the Western Hemisphere. Some 3,000 artifacts, which represent about 5 percent of the Museum’s considerable holdings, are displayed in the hall.
The hall explores the continent’s history and cultural diversity, highlighting regions such as India, China, Japan, Korea, Siberia, and Armenia, and exploring topics that include trade and the rise of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism. Sections of the hall are arranged roughly as if on a map, and it is possible to walk through the hall following either a northern or southern trade route.
Detailed dioramas include depictions of a wedding in a rural Hindu village in central India; a faithful re-creation of a late 19th-century healing ceremony of the Sakha of Eastern Siberia; and an ornate wedding chair, which would have carried a traditional Chinese bride to her new life with her husband’s family.
Our Family Adventure To The American Museum of Natural History took us next to the Hall of African Peoples. The Hall of African Peoples explores Africa’s cultural heritage from ancient Egypt to more modern times. The hall highlights lifestyles and customs—many of them disappearing—of peoples living in four environments: grasslands, deserts, forests, and river regions.
The religious, political, economic, and domestic aspects of life are richly illustrated with artifacts, including sculpted masks, religious icons, and tools for farming, fishing, iron-making, and more. Dioramas depict a variety of scenes, from the Berbers of the desert in North Africa to the Pokot people in East Africa. In a corridor at the end of the hall are artifacts of the great river valley civilizations of the Niger, Nile, Zambezi, and Congo.
The Hall of African Peoples features an extensive collection of musical instruments, including the lyre, zither, flute, trumpet, oboe, bells, horns, and drums. It also showcases dramatically displayed examples of ceremonial costumes, from the masses of banana fronds covering a Barawa “Dodo dancer” from Nigeria to the elaborate skin mask and symbolic painted leopard spots worn by the initiator of Bira boys of the Congo into manhood.
Our Family Adventure To The American Museum of Natural History took us to the Hall of Mexico and Central America. The Hall of Mexico and Central America features the diverse art, architecture, and traditions of Mesoamerican pre-Columbian cultures through artifacts that span from 1200 BC to the early 1500s.
On display are collections of monuments, figurines, pottery, and jewelry from the Maya, Toltec, Olmec, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican cultures, which offer clues about the political and religious symbols, social characteristics, and artistic traditions of the respective groups.
Works on view in this hall include ninth-century Mayan stone carvings that depict warrior-lords bearing weapons. These carvings offer invaluable insights into the ancient Mayan civilization, a collection of independent city-states that alternately warred and traded with each other. Another remarkable artifact is a 3,000-year-old jade sculpture known as the Kunz Axe. Made from one of the most precious materials in the region, the part-human, part-jaguar figure is one of the largest jade objects ever found in Mesoamerica.
One of two halls in the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing, the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs displays fossils from one of the two major groups of dinosaurs. Saurischians are characterized by grasping hands, in which the thumb is offset from the other fingers. This hall features the imposing mounts of Tyrannosaurus rex and Apatosaurus.
Branching off the main line are alcoves containing smaller groups of dinosaurs within the saurischian family: theropods, marked by a three-toed foot; tetanurans, which have a three-fingered hand; and finally, coelurosaurs, a group of saurischian dinosaurs with relatively long arms. This group includes maniraptors, whose evolutionary branch extends to birds—the only group of dinosaurs alive today.
In a corridor leading to this hall, video footage and archival photographs explore the history of paleontology at the Museum from the first fossil expedition in 1891 to the present day. On display are a Diplodocus pelvis found in 1897, the first fossil dinosaur specimen collected by Museum researchers; mock-ups of a preparation lab and a fossil site in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert; and a cast of the fossilized remains of a nesting oviraptorid female, found in Mongolia in 1994, which confirmed that some dinosaurs incubated their eggs like modern birds.
Our Family Adventure To The American Museum of Natural History ended with a quick stop at Central Park before heading to Grand Central Station. A snack was in order at our favorite place before heading home to our girls’ delight at Grand Central Market. It was a day well spent even though we did not get to see all the exhibits but leaving those we didn’t see for a totally new experience on our next visit. We were very pleased to experience how kid-friendly the American Museum of Natural History was along with the WELLthy MOMents we created and here’s to more family adventures in between!
