Celebrate Fossil Day

Wednesday, October 12 11:33 am

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 »

New Research Points to Dinosaurs’ Colorful Past

Thursday, September 15 5:19 pm

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.

Titanosaur Nest from The World’s Largest Dinosaurs

Friday, July 22 1:35 pm

A titanosaur hatchling emerges from its nest. © AMNH/D. Finnin

They are some of the rarest of rare artifacts: fossil dinosaur eggs with the embryo still inside. And they are prized for what they can tell paleontologists about the adults that laid them.

The exhibition The World’s Largest Dinosaurs features a scale model of a nest found at Auca Mahuevo, Argentina, one of the largest known dinosaur nesting sites in the world. While it isn’t always possible to figure out which dinosaur laid a particular egg, in this case, an embryo within an egg found at Auca Mahuevo site allowed scientists to identify these eggs as those of titanosaurs, a group of sauropods that included such species as Ampelosaurus and Saltasaurus. Herds of female titanosaurs are thought to have laid the thousands of eggs — 15 to 40 at a time — in shallow nests dug out with their huge feet in dry mud and sand over miles of ground at Auca Mahuevo.

Titanosaurs are among the biggest sauropods, the group of saurischian dinosaurs featured in this exhibition. Titanosaur fossils have been found on every continent except Antarctica, and some of the biggest titanosaurs have been discovered in South America. These include the massive Argentinosaurus, which greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibition. In life, an adult Argentinosaurus could weigh up to 90 tons.

Size is a curious part of the story of dinosaur eggs. One might think such huge creatures would have equally super-sized eggs. But consider that the extinct elephant bird, which weighed about 880 lbs., had, on average, a 26-lb. egg compared to the average 9-lb. egg of the Ampelosaurus, which grew to about 7.7 tons. Also, there is a limit to the size any egg can be. Eggshell is very brittle, so the larger the egg, the thicker its shell must be to keep from shattering. However, the shell must also allow oxygen and water to get through to the embryo growing inside, and, above a certain size, the egg wouldn’t be both suitably strong and porous. So although the sauropod young grew big very fast, they started out relatively tiny. The hatchlings of the 13-ton female Mamenchisaurus at the center of the exhibition, for example, would have weighed about as much as a small goose.

Click here for more information about The World’s Largest Dinosaurs or to buy tickets.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer issue of Rotunda, the Members’ magazine.

Inside View: The World's Largest Dinosaurs

Friday, May 13 9:55 am

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.

AMNH Moveable Museums Go to Washington

Monday, November 01 5:28 pm

On Friday, October 22, two of the American Museum of Natural History’s Moveable Museums — 37-foot-long customized recreational vehicles outfitted as mobile exhibition spaces with specimens, videos, and interactive activities — made their way to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for a two-day science Expo, the culmination of the inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival.

The Expo featured some 550 science and engineering companies, museums, science centers, colleges and universities, and 200 K–12 schools presenting more than 1,500 free, hands-on activities and over 75 stage shows featuring scientists, celebrities, magicians, jugglers, rappers, and more.

A welcome video featuring President Barack Obama kicked off the event. Read more »