Navigating New York: American Museum of Natural History

The program for Day 3 in New York City was to see the dinosaur bone exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

After figuring out the maze of the New York subway system, we hopped on the C Line which took us right at the museum door within four stops. The only snag was the wait time. When we entered the museum, the security guard told us that the line-up extended outside the entrance doors and along the corridor of the subway station. We ate our snacks as we waited in line. When we finally got in, we headed straight to the 4^th floor where the Fossil Halls are. This is one of the city’s premier attractions. There are two sections – the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing and the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives.

The dinosaur wing features the Hall of the Ornithischian Dinosaurs, where we saw bones of a Stegosaurus, a Triceratops, a Corythosaurus, and similar types of genasaurs and cerapods. There was also a mummy of a duck-billed dinosaur and some dinosaur eggs.

The Hall of the Saurischian Dinosaurs displays bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, an Apatosaurus, as well as smaller groups of dinosaurs within this saurian family, which includes maniraptors, whose evolutionary branch extends to birds, the only group of dinosaurs alive today.

Together, the two dinosaur halls feature about 100 specimens, with 85% of them fossils, not mere casts. 

I am glad we brought our son here. He loves dinosaurs and has watched all the “Land Before Time” movies and spin-offs.  He knows the scientific names of the dinosaurs and is familiar with their characteristics, but I found it so cute when he called out the names of the “Land Before Time” characters – Little Foot (an Apatosaurus), Cera (a Triceratops), Ducky (a Saurolophus), Petrie (a Pteranodon), Spike (a Stegosaurus), Chomper and Ruby (both Oviraptors).

We also checked out the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Orientation Centre, where the 122-foot-long bones of a Titanosaur literally spills out of the exhibition room. It also displays sauropod pelvis, vertrebra, and femur fossils and has a room for a video presentation on evolution narrated by Meryl Streep.

Over at the other wing, we walked through the Hall of Primitive Mammals, the Hall of Vertebrate Origins, and the Paul and Irma Milstein Hall of Advanced Mammals.

The first exhibit traces the lower branches of the evolutionary tree of mammals. The second one traces the evolution of vertebrates or animals with back bones. The third features extinct mammal relatives such as mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed cats, camels, giant ground sloths, and others that became extinct possibly due to climate changes at the end on the last ice age, infectious diseases, and the hunting by humans.

Again, we were glad to have brought our son here. His favourite characters from the “Ice Age” movies were brought to life. He recognized Manny (woolly mammoth), Sid (ground sloth), Diego (sabre-toothed tiger), Scrat (sabre-toothed squirrel), Eddie (opossum), Fast Tony (giant armadillo), among others.

I went with the boys to the Dino Store where we bought him a cute stuffed baby Apatosaurus which he readily nicknamed, Little Foot. Then we parted ways.

My husband and our son wanted to stay at the museum and check out the Earth and Planetary Sciences Hall on the ground floor, which I had expected since my husband has a background in geology and both my boys are into rocks, minerals, and astronomy.  The hall showcases remarkable specimens, including meteorites, minerals, and rare gems, that offer clues about the origins of our solar system and the dynamic processes of our planet.

They also wanted to see the Space Show at the Hayden Planetarium Space Centre, one of the world’s largest virtual reality simulators, displaying an astonishingly realistic view of planets, star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies based on a scientifically accurate 3D map of the observable universe maintained by museum scientists and visualization experts. The featured film at the time of our visit was, “Dark Universe,” which was about the mysteries of invisible dark matter underlying galaxies.

As much as I would like to join them and even stay for as long as possible at the museum to see the other exhibits, there was no time. This museum is huge and we had only covered one floor.  There was still so much to see. With 28 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls that feature everything from plants, animals, fossils, rocks, minerals, meteorites, human remains, and cultural artifacts, in addition to special exhibitions, a planetarium, and a library, we needed more than a day. We just had to prioritize.

I made a mental note to come back here and to make sure I arrive first thing in the morning next time so we could see everything, except for the Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians, which is always high on my scale of fear factor due to my phobia of lizards and similar creatures. But high on my list are the cultural exhibitions that feature cultural artifacts from Asia, Africa, North and South America, the Pacific Islands, and the Indigenous tribes of North America.

In the meantime, I planned on having my cultural fix at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on West 5^th Avenue which was close by.

My boys and I agreed on texting each other at around 4 p.m. to figure out where we’d meet to go back to our hotel together.