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As a nearsighted and asthmatic child growing up in Manhattan, summer vacations in upstate New York provided a relief from illness for Roosevelt and whetted his appetite for the outdoors. In 1867, two years before the museum was founded, eight-year-old Teddy created his own Roosevelt Natural History Museum in his family’s New York City home. The collection included birds’ nests, insects and mouse skeletons, and it expanded to include some 250 specimens — items Roosevelt later donated to the Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution. Some of his donations are on display, including three African plovers and a snowy owl.
The hall also shows footage from filmmaker Ken Burns’ The National Parks: America’s Best Idea as well as a touch-screen timeline that highlights important milestones in Roosevelt’s life.
The Memorial Hall leads into the newly restored Hall of North American Mammals. The giant dioramas afford a close-up view of impressive animals such as the Alaska brown bear, American bison, big horn sheep and moose. The dioramas are amazingly lifelike and have never looked better.
Some of the originals date to 1942 and had faded with time. Artists, conservators, taxidermists and designers have worked to painstakingly re-color faded fur, dust delicate leaves and restore the background paintings. Several dioramas re-create scenes from national parks and monuments that Theodore Roosevelt helped establish, including Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, the Grand Tetons, Mesa Verde, and the Grand Canyon.
All of this is only part of the reason why families frequent the American Museum of Natural History. The fourth floor dinosaur galleries are legendary, holding the world’s largest collection of dinosaur fossils, and the famous Blue Whale in the Hall of Ocean Life is a replica of the largest animal living or extinct. Many kids also love the elephants in the Hall of African Mammals, the Hall of Meteorites with the largest meteorite on display in the world, and the spectacular Rose Center for Earth and Space and its Hayden Planetarium shows.
Children ages 5 to 12 can visit the Discovery Room, with a special array of artifacts, specimens, puzzles and scientific challenges. They can hunt for animals in a replica African baobab tree or explore minerals, arthropods and skulls in cabinets full of fascinating specimens.
In the unlikely event that more family activity is needed, the recently renovated New York Historical Society nearby includes the DiMenna Children’s History Museum on the lower level, a chance to experience a bit of the lives of New York kids in years past. And not far away is the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, the city’s only museum dedicated to younger children, including a fourth floor devoted to tots age four and under.
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