The Natural History Museum: Choosing Between Visiting, Dinosaurs Hall, Birds of The World and Hall of Biodiversity

Over this Thanksgiving break, I had the pleasure of visiting the Museum of Natural History, to see the exhibits worked on by our professor. These exhibits were exciting, and related to numerous topics that we talked about in class. In this essay, I will be talking about what I saw, and how they relate to what we learned in class.

The first hall that I visited was the “Hall of Biodiversity” on the first floor. The hall highlighted both biodiversity and the factors that threaten it. There was a huge diorama that showed part of the Dzanga-Sangha rainforest, which was apparently one of the Earth’s “most diverse ecosystems.” They also showed off multiple species that went extinct over the years of history. One of them was the Dodo bird, which went extinct after the year 1600, as Dutch soldiers hunted them soon after discovery. Due to all of this hunting, deforestation, and destruction of their nests from Dutch animals, they simply couldn’t survive in their environment anymore, and died out. Another thing they showed off were Endangered Species, which are species that are close to extinction due to none other than human activity. This reminded me of what we learned in class, where we learned that we currently live in the Anthropocene era, which means that all life on Earth is led by humans. Humans get to choose which species die and go extinct, and which species get to flourish and survive. They’re altering our biodiversity by killing off these animals.

The second hall that I visited was the exhibit, “Birds of the World.” In this hall, there were multiple dioramas that showed different biomes that birds live in, along with the species that lived in these biomes. Each of the habitats that were shown were all wildly different, yet somehow birds managed to live in these areas. An example of this is in the grasslands and marshes of Argentina. The birds that live in these areas are water birds, who survive by eating insects and seeds. However, the birds in a place like Australia are completely different. The birds there are honeyeaters, parrots, cockatoos, and birds who live off of fruit. To add onto this, the birds that live in Antarctica are penguins. The exhibit namely showed off King Penguins, who live off of fish and can survive the harsh cold, but can’t actually fly. What all of this reminded me of was the concept of evolution. Over millions of years, a species will adapt to its environment, and the animals with the stronger genes will survive and go on to reproduce. The traits of these animals will be passed on, until the entire species has them. For example, let’s take the birds in Australia. The birds there are primarily fruit eaters. So, perhaps a bird with a larger beak that made it easier to eat the fruit ended up breeding. Its offspring would have a large beak as well. This bird would breed, and its children would breed. This would keep happening, until millions of years later, the entire species now has this large beak, and can easily eat fruits.

The final halls that I visited were the “Dinosaur Halls.” First, I went to see the Saurischian Dinosaurs. The dinosaurs in this group apparently were different due to their grasping hands, where the thumb is offset from their other fingers. There are branches of these dinosaurs, which include theropods (dinosaurs with three toes), tetanurans (dinosaurs with three fingers), and coelurosaurs (dinosaurs with long arms). An interesting thing to see in this exhibit was Diplodocus pelvis that was found in 1897, which was the first dinosaur fossil found by the Museum’s researchers. After visiting this hall, I went to see the Ornithischian Dinosaurs. These dinosaurs are different because of their backwards-pointing extension of their pubis bone. These dinosaurs have two different branches, the Genasaurs (dinosaurs with inset tooth rows that form cheeks) and the Cerapods (dinosaurs with an uneven covering of tooth enamel). Overall, both exhibits house over 100 different dinosaur species. These exhibits show just how diverse life can be. An entire species that went extinct was so diverse, with entirely different species and subspecies, with only their skeletons as proof that they even existed. Humans have many different races with unique things about them, but in the end, they all have the same general skeleton. Meanwhile, dinosaurs come in so many shapes and sizes, that this exhibit showed over a hundred of them, and that still wasn’t even every dinosaur. Nature is simply an amazing thing.

In the end, the museum was a fun trip. I got to see many varied exhibits that all had different things in them. Plus, these exhibits had things related to class in them. I can see why you wanted us to see these exhibits for ourselves. I had been to this museum numerous times before in my life, but I never thought about the exhibits in the way I did while I visited recently.