Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation
Visiting the Gilder Center
Spectacular architecture designed to spark your curiosity. New exhibitions and immersive experiences that reveal nature’s hidden realms. A soaring space that connects to all the Museum has to offer.
The new Gilder Center features new exhibition galleries and one-of-a-kind experiences, including an insectarium, butterfly vivarium, floor-to-ceiling collections displays, and more—and connects to the rest of the American Museum of Natural History on four floors.
Entry to the Gilder Center is included with Museum admission. Additional tickets are required for the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium and the Invisible Worlds immersive experience.
Become a Museum Member today for an entire year of free access to the exciting exhibitions and experiences in the new Gilder Center.
Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium
Discover all the ways in which insects are beautiful, surprising, and essential.
They are the most diverse group of animals on Earth–and they're critical to our planet’s survival.
In this gallery, you'll encounter 18 live species, explore pinned specimens, and interact with digital exhibits to learn about the roles insects play in the well-being of ecosystems, agriculture, and human health: as pollinators, decomposers, builders, soil aerators, seed dispersers, and more.
Meet the Insects
Get a close look at major insect orders, with exhibits dedicated to beetles, true bugs, stick insects and leaf insects, moths and butterflies, and crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids.
Here, you'll encounter more than a dozen live species, examine pinned specimens, and use tools of scientific visualization to discover insects' great variety in body shape, amazing forms of camouflage, and more.
And don't miss one of the world's largest displays of live leafcutter ants, featuring a foraging area, transparent skybridge, and a fungus garden where you can observe how this colony of ants works together as a "superorganism."
Be a Bee
Follow larger-than-life models of European honeybees to a large-scale, immersive hive model and discover how a honeybee colony works together to survive. Explore bee behaviors that range from building to dancing on a special digital interactive exhibit that challenges you to be a bee.
Explore the Insects of NYC
Explore a large digital interactive that introduces you to the insects of New York City–and discover the roles insects play in ecosystems in each of the five boroughs.
Then, compose your own insect chorus in a sound gallery of Central Park grasshoppers, beetles, katydids, and others to experience the variety of "music" produced by insects in the Museum's backyard.
Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Collections Core
Discover how scientific collections can help us understand our world.
Only a small fraction of the Museum's specimens and objects are on display. Millions more are studied behind the scenes.
But now, in the Collections Core, you can see more than 3,000 objects from the Museum's research collections, from astrophysics to zoology.
Evidence Fueling Discovery
Get an up-close look at the amazing variety of scientific collections in engaging displays across three levels, including in the Macaulay Family Foundation Collections Galleries on the first and second floors.
As you explore the Collections Core, you'll find out why collections are essential to scientific research and engage with important questions, including:
Why Do We Collect?
Collections provide evidence that we can study, now and far into the future, asking new questions and using new tools. Through collections, we can learn about the universe, our planet, and the diversity of life—including ourselves.
How Do We Study Collections?
We might look at a single specimen or large comparative groups, using technologies ranging from traditional methods such as observation and dissection to modern genomics and 3D modeling. It all depends on the questions we ask.
Who Uses Our Collections?
People at the Museum and around the world—scientists, inventors, artists, students, and perhaps even you!
Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium
Meet the butterflies—hundreds of them!
They’re not just colorful: some are amazingly camouflaged. Some fly thousands of miles to lay eggs. They live all over the world, from the tropics to the Arctic—and inside the Museum.
In the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium, discover dozens of different species and the important and unexpected roles they play in ecosystems around our planet.
How Many Can You Spot?
On any single day, you'll see butterflies representing 80 different species flying, feeding, and mingling.
If one lands on you, don’t be afraid. Butterflies don’t bite. You can let it stay on you as long as it wants, or you can ask a staff member to remove it.
Look at the Lifecycle
From eggs, butterflies and moths develop into worm-like larva—we call them caterpillars—that eat, grow, and shed their skin to reveal the pupa.
In the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium, visitors can learn about this lifecycle, see a pupae incubator, and perhaps even glimpse a chrysalis split and an adult butterfly emerge and expand its wings.
The Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium is free for Members. Not a Member? Join Now.
Invisible Worlds Immersive Experience
Explore nature’s hidden realms, and discover how all life on Earth is connected.
Be transported by a breathtakingly beautiful, scientifically rigorous immersive interactive experience that explores networks of life on Earth at all scales—some too fast, too small, or too slow for the human eye.
Related, Connected, Communicating
Start in the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Gallery, with an introduction to the ties that connect all life on our planet.
Discover why your hand resembles a bat's wing. Find out how organisms interact in ecosystems, and as part of complex food webs.
And consider the ultimate social network: cells relaying impulses to neighboring cells in the human brain.
Become Part of the Story
Proceed to the Invisible Worlds venue to enjoy a 12-minute immersive experience based on scientific data visualized like never before.
Become part of the story of life on Earth as you travel through a canopy of a Brazilian rainforest, follow a migration of jellyfish to the ocean's surface, and delve into the human brain while interacting with the projections all around you.
The Invisible Worlds immersive experience is free for Members. Not a Member? Join now.
The American Museum of Natural History gratefully acknowledges Raymond James as the inaugural sponsor of Invisible Worlds.
David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center
One of the world's largest natural history libraries has a new home.
With spectacular views of Theodore Roosevelt Park and the Griffin Exploration Atrium, the Museum's new Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center offers visitors opportunities to browse, read, and explore library collections.
Reading Room
Enjoy comfortable seating, public computer terminals, and sweeping views to the west—as well as a grand wall-to-wall bookcase displaying collections that highlight the history of the Museum—in the new Reading Room.
A dedicated Scholar's Room for visiting researchers is available by appointment.
Alcove Gallery
Don't miss this new exhibit space, showcasing holdings from the Library's Rare Book Collection and other special collections. The Alcove Gallery's inaugural exhibition, What's in a Name?, explores how and why scientific names are assigned through rare books and art, with a focus on the names of insects.
Learn more about What's in a Name?, included with any admission.
More About the Architecture
It's being called “New York’s most exciting new building.” Inspired by natural formations that spark curiosity and exploration, the Gilder Center creates more than 30 connections among 10 of the Museum’s buildings to improve visitor circulation on campus. It was designed by Studio Gang, the international and urban practice design firm led by Jeanne Gang.
The Gilder Center's unique, organic design is informed by the natural paths wind and water carve into landscapes that are exciting to explore, as well as the forms that water etches in blocks of ice. Visitors enter through the Kenneth C. Griffin Exploration Atrium, a sunlit central space notable for its seamless, undulating interior of arching walls, bridges, and caverns that invites everyone to explore by offering alluring glimpses of exhibitions, collections spaces, and classrooms on four levels. The Griffin Atrium, like much of the Gilder Center, was constructed by spraying structural concrete directly onto rebar without formwork. This spray technique, known as "shotcrete," was invented by Museum naturalist and taxidermist Carl Akeley and is finished by hand.
The Gilder Center facade is clad in Milford pink granite–the same stone used for the Museum's entrance on Central Park West. The rounded windows are made of bird-safe fritted glass. The diagonal pattern of the stone panels evokes both the phenomenon of geological layering and the richly textured surface of the stone masonry on the 77th Street side of the Museum.
Gilder Center Highlights
The American Museum of Natural History gratefully acknowledges Richard Gilder and the Gilder Foundation, Inc., whose leadership support has made the construction of the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation possible.
The Gilder Center is also made possible thanks to the generous support of the City of New York, the Council of the City of New York, the Manhattan Borough President, the State of New York, the New York State Assembly, and the New York State Senate.
Critical founding support has been provided by David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman; Kenneth C. Griffin; Allison and Roberto Mignone; the Davis Family; the Bezos Family Foundation; Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.; the Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family; Judy and Josh Weston; the Macaulay Family Foundation; Katheryn C. Patterson and Thomas L. Kempner, Jr.; New York Life Foundation; the Seedlings Foundation in honor of Michael Vlock; the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Foundation; Valerie and Jeffrey Peltier; Morgan Stanley; The Marc Haas Foundation in honor of Robert H. Haines; The Hearst Foundations; Joella and John Lykouretzos; the Yurman Family; the Charina Endowment Fund; Nancy Peretsman and Robert Scully; Shaiza Rizavi and Jonathan Friedland; Nancy B. and Hart Fessenden; Keryn and Ted Mathas; Elysabeth Kleinhans; the Estate of Margaret D. Bishop; the Henry Peterson Foundation; and an anonymous donor.
The American Museum of Natural History gratefully acknowledges Con Edison as the Gilder Center’s Lead Sustainability Sponsor.
Family engagement and programming in the Gilder Center is proudly sponsored by the Eileen P. Bernard Exhibition Fund.