American Museum of Natural History
Lisa and I spent Friday in the American Museum of Natural History. The place is immense. If you plan on going and want to just look at everything, give yourself at least half a day. We started out walking around the first floor, checking out all the dioramas of North American animals. That was pretty neat. There was also an area for underwater creatures (I’m pretty sure it was on the first floor) that has a gi-normous replica of a Blue Whale.
We also watched a video called Passport to the Universe in the Hayden Planetarium. In it, Tom Hanks narrarates the layout of the universe, showing us all what a vast expanse of space…space really is. After the video we did a quick tour of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. They do a nice timeline for the universe from the big bang (13 billion years ago) right up to life on Earth today.
When we finished in the Earth and Space area, we went back to the main part of the museum. We visited the second floor and saw some of the pieces they had from Native American, African, Latin American and Asian ancient civilizations. This was interesting, but it’s never really been enough to captivate my attention. So we made our way through there relatively quickly.
We went back down to the first floor to visit the rare gems and minerals collection. The bling was in full display down there. I’m surprised some rapper hasn’t bought the place up just to add to their already impressive collection of ice. Afterwards we went back up to the third floor to see the primate display to fulfill my unhealthy obsession with monkeys. The primate area was pretty small, so we were through there relatively quickly.
Lastly, we finally made it to the fourth floor for the big payoff…the dinosaurs. The museum has an incredibly impressive dinosaur collection. Rooms and rooms and rooms full of bones and fossils.
After we finished up at the museum, we took a walk through Central Park on our way back to the hotel, making a brief stop at Strawberry Fields along the way.
