The Sites: New York City - American Museum of Natural History

I was that child who always wanted to play school rather than anything else.  I was that child who always had her nose in a book, even at the dinner table.  I was that child who believed that the exhibits in the museums came to life at night. 

You can imagine how excited I was about the Night at the Museum movies.  You can imagine how even more excited I was to spend a day exploring the American Museum of Natural History.

Founded in 1869, the Museum has grown to encompass over 32 million specimens and artifacts, along with temporary exhibits that rotate throughout the year.  It is a place that returns you almost instantly to that state of wide-eyed wonderment and curiosity that so many of us lose when we leave childhood.

Moose diorama, AMNH

The Hall of Mammals and the other wildlife dioramas located throughout the halls are some of the finest you'll find, with their scales ranging from the two-story coral reef in the Hall of Ocean Life (also home to a life-sized replica of a blue whale) to the smaller habitats of more common creatures like skunks and coyotes.  

Quartz, AMNH

The Hall of Minerals boasts an extensive collection and display of what are literally the building blocks of our lives: elements, rocks, compounds, crystals, gems, all of the parts that make up the whole of our existence.  The obvious beauty of a rare gemstone is one thing, but the complex simplicity of a quart crystal is another thing entirely. 

Barosaurus, Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, AMNH

However, I had really come here for one main reason: the Fossil Halls.  The AMNH boats the world's largest collection of vertebrate fossils, with rooms upon rooms of prehistoric creatures soaring and towering overhead.  
The Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda welcomes visitors with its towering Barosaurs, while the exhibition halls upstairs boast sauropod after theropod after mammoth, leaving you in complete awe of these creatures that once walked upon this same planet. 

The complex also houses a planetarium, a library, the requisite gift shops and cafes...all of those things that we have come to expect from our museums, if only because it has become more difficult for us to fathom spending time learning without commercializing it in some way. It was too much to take in for just one visit.  This will be a required stop on all subsequent trips to the city for me.