American Museum of Natural History
![Facade of the east entrance from [[Central Park West]]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/USA-NYC-American_Museum_of_Natural_History.JPG)
The
American Museum of Natural History (
AMNH) is a
natural history museum on the
Upper West Side of
Manhattan in
New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from
Central Park, the museum complex comprises 20 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain about 32 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human
cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum occupies more than . AMNH has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, and averages about five million visits annually.
The AMNH is a private
501(c)(3) organization. The naturalist
Albert S. Bickmore devised the idea for the American Museum of Natural History in 1861, and, after several years of advocacy, the museum opened within Central Park's
Arsenal on May 22, 1871. The museum's first purpose-built structure in Theodore Roosevelt Park was designed by
Calvert Vaux and
J. Wrey Mould and opened on December 22, 1877. Numerous wings have been added over the years, including the main entrance pavilion (named for
Theodore Roosevelt) in 1936 and the
Rose Center for Earth and Space in 2000.
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