From tweetups to touring the Museum using AMNH Explorer, TheNew York Times features the Museum’s digital efforts in a special section out today.
Writing about social media, Jennifer Preston focuses on two recent Museum tweetups that offered participants behind-the-scenes tours of the collections and looks at two exhibitions, Brain: The Inside Storyand The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, which opens April 16.
A separate article about smartphone apps praises AMNH Explorer for taking “full advantage of the latest technology” by using the Museum’s wi-fi network to pinpoint a user’s location. “The app’s distinguishing feature is both ingenious and pragmatic,” writes Sam Grobart. “In addition to exhibitions, the app can point visitors toward cafes, gift shops and—an especially valuable feature for those traveling with children—bathrooms.”
And in a story about how a small computer called an Arduino has revolutionized exhibition design, Nick Bilton points to interactive exhibits at the Museum, including one in Brain: The Inside Story that tests a person’s ability to draw a shape while looking only at a reflection.
There are now nine more dinosaurs to explore using the Museum’s Dinosaurs app for iPhone and iPod touch, which this week added new chapters with detailed species profiles, photos and renderings, stories about specimens’ discoveries, and more.
The new chapters include a look at Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis, the sauropod known for its exceptionally long neck. With an adult length of 60 feet, including a 30-foot-long neck, and height of 11 feet at the shoulder, Mamenchisaurus is the largest dinosaur discovered in China to date. A life-sized model of this colossal animal is at the center of the upcoming exhibition, The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, which opens at the Museum April 16.
The app update also includes links to dinosaur videos on the Museum’s YouTube channel and recent podcasts. Learn more about the app here and download it for free from iTunes.
Looking for the perfect way to fit a dinosaur under the tree?
Today, the American Museum of Natural History launched DINOSAURS iPAD:The American Museum of Natural History Collections, the Museum’s first app designed specifically for the iPad. DINOSAURS: iPAD expands on the Museum’s inaugural app, DINOSAURS:The American Museum of Natural History Collectionsfor iPhone® and iPod®, by offering even more in-depth information and larger images of eight favorite dinosaurs: Allosaurus, Anatotitan, Apatosaurus, Edmontosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, Protoceratops Stegosaurus, and Styracosaurus, as well as accounts of their discovery by such famed dinosaur hunters as Barnum Brown, Walter Granger, and Peter Kaisen. Over time, the app will be updated with new chapters to cover all 36 dinosaurs in the Museum’s collection.
DINOSAURS: iPAD also features an opening screen mosaic of nearly 1,000 separate high-resolution images and unique social networking functionality, encouraging aspiring paleontologists of all ages to explore the Museum’s world-famous fossil collection and to engage in real-time conversations with other users from home, in the field, or in the classroom.
The latest in a series of apps that highlight the Museum’s storied collections and bring its world-class holdings to a global audience, DINOSAURS: iPAD can be purchased for $2.99 at the iTunes Store. All proceeds will directly benefit the Museum’s scientific and educational programs.
DINOSAURS iPAD is also a fun, interactive way to expand and refresh dinosaur knowledge in advance of the Museum’s major new exhibition, The World’s Largest Dinosaurs (April 16, 2011–January 2, 2012), which will take visitors beyond the bones and into the amazing anatomy of a uniquely super-sized group of dinosaurs who thrived for 140 million years: the long-necked and long-tailed sauropods, which ranged in size from 15 to 150 feet long. With innovative, interactive exhibits–including a life-sized, detailed model of a 60-foot Mamenchisaurus–The World’s Largest Dinosaurs will draw on the latest science to take visitors inside these giants’ bodies and answer the intriguing questions of how such extremely large animals breathed, ate, moved, and survived.
When astrophysicists point their telescopes at the universe, iPhone and iPod touch users can now gaze with them using the Museum’s new app, Cosmic Discoveries. The app features nearly a thousand images of everything from the pockmarked surface of Mercury to the majestic Horsehead Nebula. Culled from the Museum’s archives and Science bulletins as well as dozens of space agencies and observatories around the world, the photos have been stitched together on the app’s opening screen to form a mosaic of the gas giant Saturn and its rings.
Users can pinch and zoom in on the mosaic to get a close-up look at images. Cosmic Discoveries also features in-depth stories about Comets, Galactic Clusters, Pulsars, X-Ray Galaxy Clusters, Protostars and Very Young Stars, Neutrino Bursts, Planetary Nebulae, and Planets in the Solar System. The stories chronicle how they were discovered, who discovered them, and other interesting facts.
Cosmic Discoveries was released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Museum’s Rose Center for Earth and Space and is available for free in the iTunes App Store.
Dinosaurs: American Museum of Natural History Collections — the Museum’s first app for the iPhone and iPod touch — has added illustrated stories documenting the discovery of two more fossils, the herbivorous Psittacosaurus and its three-horned cousin, the Triceratops. The app, which debuted in February, features more than 800 photographs, models, and illustrations from the Museum Library archives as well as fascinating stories behind the fossils on display in the fourth-floor David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing.
In addition to highlighting two new fossils, the updated app also includes new images in its striking interactive mosaic of the Tyrannosaurus rex. Users can zoom in to the mosaic to scan individual photographs, each of which includes a caption with additional information, comment on an image, or share it with a friend via email. The app is geared towards paleontologists of all ages, whether they’re looking to enhance their Museum visit or to dig up information on the Museum’s dinosaur fossils from anywhere in the world.
“The app is an expansion of what you can see in the halls, a way to provide a broader context for how specimens are discovered, mounted, and put up,” says Lowell Dingus, a research associate in the Museum’s Division of Paleontology who contributed to the app.
When it was first released, Dinosaurs was the most downloaded free education app on iTunes for three weeks. So far, it’s been downloaded more than 397,400 times.
Last month, the Museum launched the AMNH Explorer, a groundbreaking free app that’s part navigation system and part personal tour guide. Using the Museum’s new public WiFi system, Explorer pinpoints a user’s location and offers turn-by-turn directions to exhibits, cafés, restrooms as well as information about more than 140 objects and specimens, special tours, and a way to share the experience via Facebook and Twitter. (Read early reviews of Explorer.)
