Beautiful Nature

Welcome to the Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany. This museum features a popular collection of dinosaur fossils as well as a cast of the skeleton of the upright hominid Australopithecus afarensis, named Lucy by her discoverers.

It also holds the world’s largest and most diverse collection of preserved birds: over 2000 specimens, with some of the most interesting and unusual on display. Join this Expedition to be spellbound by the diversity of forms and the gorgeous colors of these birds.

Many birds use bright colors and ornamentation for socio-sexual communication. In other words, birds flirt with their feathers. The peacock’s plumage is famous, but the hummingbird and flamingo are just as flamboyant.

Land birds such as pheasants and grouses take various postures to display their colors, hoping to seduce the most fertile females.

The tragopan, a variety of pheasant, has two brightly colored fleshy horns on its heads that the bird raises during courtship displays. The tragopan’s scientific name combines tragus (billy goat) with Pan (the wily Greek god).

Male peafowl—peacocks—raise and fan their tails to reveal iridescent eyespots i blue and green. This vibrant plumage is the result of pigmentation, feather structure, and light angle.

If you take an Antarctic cruise, you’ll likely stop at Half Moon Island.

It may look as desolate and uninhabited as the moon, but this small (about 420 acres) island attracts plenty of summer tourists who flock to see and photograph its skuas, chinstrap penguins, Antarctic terns, kelp gulls, petrels, sheathbills, and shags.

This species gets its name from the narrow band that makes its head look like a hat. Chinstrap penguins build nests from stones and lay two eggs, which both parents incubate in shifts for about 37 days. Once the fluffy gray chicks grow their feathers, they head out to sea.

Reunion Island, part of France and located in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, is home to one of the world’s most active volcanoes, Piton de la Fournaise. A national park covers nearly half of the island that is covered by a remarkable mosaic of ecosystems and landscapes. 

Despite the name, Chapelle de Rosemont is not a church, but a spectacular mound of lava in the Enclos Fouqué (the outer crater) of the volcano.

These hikers might be geocaching. Participants use a GPS to find hidden objects in remote locations all over the world. A typical cache is a waterproof container holding a logbook, and a pen, where finders enter the date and their code names.

As the sky here suggests, the weather at Chapelle de Rosemont can change very quickly from blinding sunlight with intense heat to dense fog with cold pelting rain. Straying from the paths is risky and visitors are advised to come prepared for any kind of weather.

The oldest civic museum in Milan, Italy, is located within the grounds of Giardini Pubblici, a public park in the center of the city. The museum features six display areas that cover mineralogy, anthropology, paleontology, and zoology.

It was founded in 1838 when naturalist Giuseppe de Cristoforis donated his extensive collections to the city of Milan.

The Invertebrate Zoology display at the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale includes cases of farfalla, Italian for “butterflies.” Butterflies and moths make up the order Lepidoptera. 

The name—from Greek words for "scale," and "wings"—refers to the tiny scales that cover these insects’ wings and the rest of the bodies.

Beetles are insects that form the order Coleoptera, meaning “sheath” and “wing,” because they have two pairs of wings, the outer pair hard and thick like a sheath or shell. Some 450,000 kinds of beetles make this the order with the most species.

With a name that means, “flame covered,” these long-legged waders filter feed on shrimp and algae. They are famous for their flamboyant courtship dances, performed in large groups. They stretch their necks, flip their heads, and shuffle in tight lines before they break off in pairs to breed.

The Australian lyrebird is famous for the striking beauty of its huge wood-colored tail that fans out in display. By contrast, many of the 393 species of parrots are vividly multi-colored in greens, red, oranges, blues, and yellows.

Located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the American Museum of Natural History houses 45 exhibition halls as well as the Hayden Planetarium and one of the world’s largest natural history libraries. 

With a staff of approximately 200 research scientists and an annual attendance of five million visitors, it is one of the world’s largest and most popular museums. 

This 94-feet-long, 21,000-pound fiberglass replica of a female blue whale reminds visitors of their responsibility to preserve and protect our oceans. The model is based on a whale found in 1925 off the tip of South America.

Here, you can see the Tree of Life display at the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. This is an example of a cladogram, a diagram or model that shows how organisms are related.

“Born of fluid, heat, and pressure, minerals and gems dazzle us with their breathtaking colors, shapes, and diversity.” These are the words that welcome visitors to the gem and mineral displays at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. 

This part of the museum houses about 375,000 specimens from around the world. 

Every kind of crystal has an orderly, internal pattern of atoms, and each mineral has its distinctive arrangement of atoms. These patterns determine a crystal’s chemical and physical properties, including shape and color.

Quartz is transparent as ice, but it occurs in a range of colors from pink to the deep purple of amethyst because of impurities in its structure. Smoky Quartz has wispy shades of brown. To the ancient Druids, this Stone of Power signified the potent power of Earth deities.