Ahead of you is the largest natural history museum in the world. The American Museum of Natural History was founded in 1869 and moved to this site in 1877, and its buildings have been expanded and rebuilt almost continuously ever since, creating a complex of twenty-five interconnected structures on four city blocks. The bronze equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt on the front steps was long controversial; Roosevelt, the great conservationist and a trustee of the museum, is flanked by an African man and a Native American on foot, a pose that critics argued depicted a racial hierarchy, and the statue was removed in 2022.
Inside the museum wait one of the largest dinosaur fossil collections in the world, the Hall of Ocean Life with its 94-foot blue whale suspended from the ceiling, the Hayden Planetarium inside its glass cube, and the meteorite room housing a 34-ton iron meteorite. Go into the fourth-floor fossil halls, which were redesigned in the 1990s under paleontologist Neil Shubin's guidance; they are among the best-organized dinosaur displays anywhere on earth.