In 1950, the Museum’s Hayden Planetarium began accepting reservations for the first trip into space as part of a publicity campaign for its exhibition Conquest of Space. Letters poured in from around the world with requests to book trips to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and beyond, capturing the public’s passion and curiosity for space exploration. One cosmic hopeful suggested surveying Earth’s planetary neighbor for ancient life.
Though interplanetary tourism is not yet possible, our fascination with space travel persists. Discover what the future holds for space exploration in the Museum’s exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration. To see more of the Hayden letters and tell us where in space you’d like to go today, click here. And if you share Arthur’s interest in dinosaurs, stop by The World’s Largest Dinosaurs before it closes on Monday, January 2.
From 75-foot dinosaurs to saber-toothed tigers, an overwhelming number of animals stopped moving ages ago. But their remains are still talking.
At the American Museum of Natural History, scientists pore over nearly 5 million fossilized specimens across many different collections, looking back in time to piece together what these unique organisms looked like and how they behaved.
In celebration of National Fossil Day, marked today by the National Park Service and the American Geological Institute, dig into some of these fascinating specimens from the Museum’s fourth-floor Fossil Halls, highlighted below.
Piecing Together a Giant
Collected in the late 1890s, the Museum’s Apatosaurus skeleton was the first sauropod—an animal belonging to a group of long-necked, quadrupedal, and gigantic dinosaurs—ever mounted. Museum preparators labored over the specimen for several years before it went on view in 1905. Nearly 90 years later, the Apatosaurus was partly disassembled and remounted to reflect new findings about the giant animal’s posture. The first version of the mount featured the wrong head as well an incorrect tail length and configuration—showing the tail dragging on the ground instead of being held up in the air. The sauropods, the largest known animals ever to walk on land, are the focus of the Museum’s current exhibition The World’s Largest Dinosaurs. Read more »
There’s new evidence that dinosaurs, once thought to resemble scaly lizards, were in fact fluffy, colorful animals. In the video below, Curator Mark Norell, who is chair of the Museum’s Division of Paleontology and studies important feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning, China, shares his thoughts on the significance of two new studies about fossilized feathers reported in the current issue of Science magazine.
If you missed the live Twitter chat with Dr. Mark Norell about fossilized feathers on Friday, Sept. 16, click here to read the discussion. Add your own comments using the hashtag#DinoFeathers.
The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, goes beyond traditional fossil shows to reveal how dinosaurs actually lived by taking visitors into the amazing biology of a uniquely super-sized group of dinosaurs: the long-necked and long-tailed sauropods, which ranged in size from 15 to 150 feet long.
In this video, go behind the scenes with The World’s Largest Dinosaurs curators Mark Norell and Martin Sander and as they explain the science behind the exhibition. Learn how dinosaur fossils are stored and cataloged from Carl Mehling, a scientific assistant at the Museum.
Did you know that dinosaur bones contain growth rings, like the rings in tree trunks, which reveal yearly periods of rapid and slow growth? Or that sauropods, the largest known dinosaurs, probably survived on a diet of plants? This is your chance to learn about dinosaurs — and to tweet all about it!
Join us on Thursday, March 3, at 6 pm for the Museum’s next tweetup, which will focus on some of the most fascinating animals ever to walk the Earth. Learn about dinosaurs, meet paleontologists, go behind the scenes to see how fossils are stored, and get a sneak preview of The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, a new exhibition that opens April 16. Enjoy refreshments in the Museum’s famous fossil halls and meet other @AMNH followers and staff.
Visit the registration page to sign up today. The Museum will notify all selected participants on February 23. The Museum’s January tweetup focused on Brain: The Inside Story. To learn more, check out these photos or read this post.
