In 1896, a Museum-led team began excavating ruins of an Ancestral Pueblo settlement in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. That work would yield tens of thousands of artifacts, including the jet frog pictured here, and generate one of the most intensely researched collections of its kind in the world. It would also inspire an act of Congress, called the Antiquities Act and signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, under which the site and others like it would be protected as national monuments.

© AMNH/Natural Science Conservation

After more than a year of restoration work, the classic habitat dioramas in the Hall of North American Mammals, which reopens this fall, seem more vibrant and realistic than ever. While the diorama scenes haven’t changed, decades of scientific research and discovery are offering new insight into the stories they tell. Below, the first in a series of posts on the new science behind the hall, this one about the majestic diorama of the Alaska moose.

In 1867, two years before this Museum was founded, eight-year-old wildlife enthusiast Theodore Roosevelt Jr. created his own Roosevelt Natural History Museum in his family’s New York City home. The collection included the skull of a seal, birds’ nests, insects, and mouse skeletons. He collected and mounted this Snowy Owl near Oyster Bay, Long Island, in 1876.

The butterflies are back! See up to 500 live, free-flying tropical butterflies in The Butterfly Conservatory: Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter at the Museum.

It’s one of the most recognizable dinosaur species, yet most people know it by a name most paleontologists stopped using more than a century ago: Brontosaurus.

One of the most iconic specimens of this massive animal is on display in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, the first sauropod—a species belonging to the group of massive, herbivorous, long-tailed dinosaurs—to be mounted and displayed at the Museum.