Carnegie Museum of Natural History

The museum

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania.

history

The Carnegie Institute goes to the Pittsburgh steel - tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie back. This industrialist , who had acquired enormous wealth , founded the institute in 1895 for the benefit of the citizens. In addition to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Science Center , the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Andy Warhol Museum belong to this facility.

In 1899, the staff under director William Jacob Holland were commissioned to procure a dinosaur for the museum. They excavated the fossils of Diplodocus carnegii , who would later be nicknamed "Dippy". In 1909, an employee of the museum, Earl Douglass , came across the very rich Jurassic dinosaur discovery site Dinosaur National Park in Utah , where numerous skeletons were excavated for the museum until 1922, including an Apatosaurus ( Brontosaurus , exhibited in the museum from 1915).

In 1905, William Temple Hornaday first described the kermodebear ( Ursus americanus kermodei ), a rare subspecies of the American black bear. About 10 percent of the animals have a white or cream-colored fur . But it turned out that the Carnegie Museum of Natural History had such a bear for several years a stuffed specimen, whose coat an employee of the clothing company Arnold, Constable & Co. , however, erroneously called bearskin offered and the taxidermy specialist Frederic S. Webster stuffed had been.

The members of Congress 1907 and "Diggy". This reconstructed posture of a Diplodocus is now scientifically outdated.

In 1907, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History hosted the second annual meeting of the American Association of Museums.

In 1956, the Powdermill remote station in Westmoreland County was added, which enables field observations .

The multi-storey dinosaur exhibition was completed in 2007 and achieved a record attendance in 2008.

Exhibitions

Skeletal reconstruction of a Protoceratops andrewsi

In total, the museum has around 21 million pieces, of which around 10,000 are on display. In addition to a permanent exhibit, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History also has temporary, traveling, and online exhibits. The museum is built around a courtyard with sculptures and a waterfall.

In addition to the shop and cafeteria, the basement primarily houses rooms for educational museum events. The ground floor also houses ancillary rooms in the right wing; the remaining part of this floor houses the permanent exhibitions on geological history , minerals and the ice age. The dinosaur exhibition continues on the floor above. There are also exhibits on the North American and African fauna . Upstairs is the section on Ancient Egypt , as well as a room on polar life , another on the American Indians , the bird section , the last part of the dinosaur section and the RP Simmons Family Gallery.

The museum works closely with schools, universities and other institutions. It is designed to be barrier-free.