American Museum of Natural History

The Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals features 43 dioramas showing North American mammals in a range of habitats. 

Each diorama shows an actual place at a particular moment—down to the season and time of day and include plants and animals as they were documented by researchers and artists in the early 20th century.

Many of these places have been protected as parts of wildlife refuges and national parks ever since, and look nearly the same today.

This diorama depicts an afternoon in Wyoming in the mid-1800s, when millions of bison inhabited the prairies. Within decades, fewer than 1,000 remained thanks to hunting. This “great slaughter” inspired the first effort to save a mammal from extinction. 

Moose are the world’s largest deer—males can top 1,700 pounds and have antlers nearly 7 feet wide. Female moose are much smaller and lack antlers, as you can see from the one at this bog on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.  

Two males are fighting over a female. Rivals will even gore each other, sometimes to the death. When courted by an undesired male, the female protests loudly, inciting a fight involving the bull she prefers. 

Brown bears are omnivores and will eat berries, nuts, grass, insects, rodents, berries, even moose and caribou calves. But mostly they live on trout and salmon, a rich food source that accounts for their large size. 

Adult males can weigh up to 1,400 pounds and females up to 700 pounds. Fun fact: the polar bear evolved from the brown bear. The 2 species can even interbreed when their ranges to overlap due to climate change.

Look closely, and you’ll see a salmon on the ground with a bite out of it. Who do you think caught it first—the bears—or that river otter glaring at them from the shore?

Wolves have the widest natural range of any land mammal other than humans and once occupied most of the Northern Hemisphere. The pack is the nucleus of wolf life. A pack can be as few as 2 or as many as several dozen. 

The leaders are usually a mating pair--the alpha male and female; the followers are chiefly their offspring.

Illuminated by moonglow and the shimmering Northern Lights, a pack of wolves speeds after a deer. These tracks show that a deer walking at the lake edge became alarmed and ran--and is now ahead of the wolves.

The Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs displays just a fraction of the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of dinosaur fossils, the largest in the world. The hall reflects the most current thinking of dinosaur traits, behavior...

and evolutionary links to birds, and examines the saurischians, a group of dinosaurs that evolved from an ancestor with grasping hands, in which the thumb is offset from the other fingers. 

This hall is organized like a giant branching tree of life that maps evolutionary relationships in a diagram known as a cladogram. The white columns at either end of the hall indicate points at which key features evolved in animals. 

Perhaps no display in the Museum attracts as much attention as this mount of Tyrannosaurus rex. In the 1990s, the Museum reconfigured the fossil mount, changing its original “Godzilla” position, erect with raised arms and a dragging tail, to a low stalking pose...

In the 1990s, the Museum reconfigured the fossil mount, changing its original “Godzilla” position, erect with raised arms and a dragging tail, to a low stalking pose with tail raised off the ground. 

In fact, because of new fossil discoveries and research into topics like bone growth and biomechanics, scientists know more about tyrannosaurs than almost any other group of fossil dinosaurs. 

It has a 4-foot-long jaw and 6-inch-long teeth. Its 66-million-year-old bones come from a specimen discovered in Montana by the Museum’s legendary dinosaur-hunter Barnum Brown in 1908. 

Fun fact: A specimen recently recovered in northeastern China suggests that tyrannosaurs, including possibly T. rex, were covered with fluffy proto-feathers at some stage in their lives.

Beneath the feet of Apatosaurus is a 107-million-year-old series of fossilized dinosaur footprints, discovered in 1938 in the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas. The smaller footprints are from a carnivorous theropod, a dinosaur that walked on two hind feet. 

This Apatosaurus, collected in the late 1890s, went on public display in 1905 and was the first sauropod skeleton—a species of massive, herbivorous, long-tailed dinosaurs—ever mounted.

It was then called Brontosaurus, but when the hall was remodeled in the 1990s the dinosaur got a new name, Apatosaurus, as well as a new skull, additional neck bones, and a longer, elevated tail in line with more recent research. 

Analysis shows that it was impossible for sauropods to hold their necks like giraffes--Apatosaurus instead kept a relatively low profile, possibly grazing on plants. Like the bones of modern birds, the Apatosaurus neck vertebrae were thin-walled and hollow. 

Fun Fact: The brain of Apatosaurus was about the size of a computer mouse.

This carnivore was one of Late Jurassic’s top predators. With sharp claws on its hands and feet and 3-inch serrated teeth in its powerful jaws, Allosaurus was probably capable of overpowering and devouring animals even larger than itself. 

This exhibit shows Allosaurus in a scavenging pose, standing astride a carcass of a partial Apatosaurus skeleton. The Apatosaurus skeleton has deep grooves in its bones, which may have been inflicted by the claws and teeth of a voracious carnivore like Allosaurus. 

Spanning two levels, the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life explores the complex web of ocean life and the connection between human and aquatic systems. Its centerpiece is a monumental model of a blue whale. 

Dioramas depict ecosystems including polar seas, coral reefs, and the sea floor. Life on Earth probably began in the water and some land animals—ancestors of manatees, seals, sea lions, and whales—returned to it. 

Models of more than 750 sea dwellers in this gallery reflect this diversity.

The blue whale is the world’s largest animal—adults can weigh over 400,000 pounds. In spring and early summer, they migrate from tropical waters to colder regions rich with krill, eating 40 million of these crustaceans a day. 

Blue whales gulp up to 17,000 gallons of krill-rich water, then force the water out through their baleen, a natural filter, trapping krill inside. Adults gorge for months, storing energy as blubber before returning to warmer waters to breed.

Here, in the eastern tropical Pacific, common dolphins travel with yellowfin tuna. The feeding frenzy of the large tuna drives schools of smaller fish toward the surface, attracting  birds such as red-footed boobies, which plunge into the water to nab a meal. 

Fishing boats also are attracted, following the dolphins and birds to find tuna. 

Dolphins have fins and flippers, but they aren’t fish—they’re air-breathing mammals that give birth to live young, and they swim differently than fish. Dolphins move their flukes up and down, while fish like tuna move their tails side to side. 

Dolphins must surface regularly to breathe through blowholes on top of their heads. A dolphin’s flipper bones are arranged the same way as those in a human arm. Both evolved from a distant common ancestor some 60 million years ago.

Walruses range throughout the Arctic Ocean and surrounding polar seas, spending most of their time in the water and migrating with the ice, which extends south in winter and retreats north in summer. 

While Atlantic and Pacific populations are genetically distinct, these pinnipeds, or fin-footed marine mammals, are recognizable by their ivory tusks—useful tools for life on the ice. 

Walruses can hook their tusks into ice floes to help haul their bodies from the water, display them to intimidate others, joust with them for prime real estate, and use them as ice picks to maintain breathing holes. 

Walruses use sensitive whiskers, called “vibrissae,” to detect clams, mussels, and other organisms buried in the sand. Grabbing the shells with their lips, walruses suck out the soft-bodied animals, consuming 3,000 to 6,000 mollusks per feeding.