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Grand Gallery

Great Canoe.

Just inside the 77th Street entrance, the Grand Gallery is a familiar gathering place for visitors, whose “Meet me at the canoe!” refers to the Museum icon at its center: the 63-foot-long Great Canoe, which hangs suspended from the ceiling, providing a dynamic focal point to this hall.

The gallery is home to a variety of specimens on extended display: a colorful ancient ammonite, a spectacular stibnite, a rare slab of jadeite jade, and a case of ancient trilobite fossils.

The Grand Gallery is also a gateway to the Museum’s Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, the Northwest Coast Hall, and to Café on One.

In This Hall

Exhibit Amethyst Geode This 12-foot geode is one of the largest in the world. Exhibit Ammonite Ammonite fossils are an incredible source of information for scientists, from dating rocks to confirming the presence of prehistoric... Exhibit Great Canoe At 63 feet long, the seaworthy Great Canoe is one of the Museum's most popular artifacts. Built in the 1870s by the native people... Exhibit Jadeite Jade A two-foot-long slice from a jadeite jade boulder provides a spectacular window into the dramatic process that formed this highly... Exhibit Spectacular Stibnite With hundreds of sword-like, metallic blue-gray crystals sprouting from a rocky base, the 1,000-pound stibnite on display in the... Exhibit Trilobites Some of the trilobite fossils on display are hundreds of millions of years old.