Location | Amherst, Massachusetts |
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Coordinates | 42°22′20″N72°30′51″W / 42.3721°N 72.5142°W |
Director | Alfred Venne |
Website | www.amherst.edu/museums/naturalhistory |
The Beneski Museum of Natural History, Amherst College, is located on the campus of Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. It showcases fossils and minerals collected locally and abroad, many by past and present students and professors. The museum is located in the Beneski Earth Sciences Building, completed in 2006. It is a member of Museums10.
The Beneski Museum of Natural History's collection dates back to the earliest days of the college. Edward Hitchcock, who joined the faculty in 1825 and served as the third president of Amherst College from 1845 to 1854, was deeply interested in the sciences and encouraged alumni to send back scientific specimens from all over the world. During his presidency, Hitchcock raised funds for the building of the Octagon, the first home of Amherst's natural history collection. In 1855, the college built Appleton Cabinet with a donation from Samuel Appleton to house the Hitchcock Ichnological Cabinet, the Gilbert Museum of Indian Relics, and the Adams Zoological Museum.
The college's collections moved from various campus buildings to the former Pratt Gymnasium in the 1940s, creating the Pratt Museum of Natural History.[ clarification needed ] The collection was moved to its current location in the Beneski Earth Sciences Building in 2006.
Today the museum houses roughly 200,000 objects, including the college's historic Hitchcock Ichnological Cabinet of more than 1,700 slabs containing dinosaur footprints, one of the largest in the world—and one largely collected by Hitchcock himself. The collection also includes the world-famous "Noah's Raven", tracks discovered in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1802 that constitute the first dinosaur fossil to be collected in North America—40 years before dinosaurs were even recognized as a distinct fossil group. [1] Researchers from all over the world come to use the museum's collections in their work.[ citation needed ]
The Beneski Museum of Natural History houses collections and exhibits that include vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology, minerals and other geologic specimens, and anthropological material. The museum contains three floors of exhibits and over 1,700 specimens on display. It is home to the world's largest collection of dinosaur tracks, [2] the Hitchcock Ichnological Cabinet, which dates from the 1850s. [3]
Specimens have been collected since the 1830s from local areas and around the world. Notable collectors include Edward Hitchcock, Charles Shepard, Amherst College Class of 1824, and Frederick Loomis, Amherst professor in the early 20th century.
The first floor showcases large Ice Age mammals, including a mastodon uncovered by Shepard in 1869 and a mammoth found by Loomis in 1923. This floor also has an exhibit on the evolution of the horse in North America. The second floor holds a variety of invertebrates, trace fossils, minerals, and exhibits on local geology. Mounted specimens and pull-out drawers on both these floors are arranged to chronicle evolution and ecology. The basement houses the ichnology collection along with dinosaur skeletons such as the most well preserved Dryosaurus specimen in the world and two legs of the massive Sauropod Dinosaur Dyslocosaurus . The museum also contains a jaw from "Alamotyrannus" which was discovered in 1924.
The Beneski Earth Sciences Building, which opened in 2006, houses both the geology program and the Beneski Museum of Natural History. Designed by Payette Associates, the 55,800-square-foot (5,180 m2) building pays homage to the strong design features of surrounding buildings such as Fayerweather Hall. The building has won the most architectural awards of any Amherst College building, receiving the 2007 American Institute of Architects New England Chapter Honor Award for Design Excellence, [4] and the 2008 Best in Class Brick in Architecture Award in the Educational Building category. [5]
The overall building design was driven by the tenets of integrated learning and the belief that students learn science best by actively participating in the research process. Many conventional classrooms were replaced with teaching laboratories that combine different research functions within single research labs, as well as provide easy access to the vast collections of the museum of natural history. [6]
The building's southern exposure faces the Holyoke Range and its instructive geoformations; landscaping incorporates 35 tons of rocks brought in from the Adirondack Mountains; and the bathroom countertops vary by floor, made of igneous rocks on one level, metamorphic rocks on another, and sedimentary rocks on yet a third. [7]
The Natural History Museum in London is a museum that exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history. It is one of three major museums on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, the others being the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Natural History Museum's main frontage, however, is on Cromwell Road.
The Canadian Museum of Nature is a national natural history museum based in Canada's National Capital Region. The museum's exhibitions and public programs are housed in the Victoria Memorial Museum Building, a 18,910-square-metre structure (203,500 sq ft) in Ottawa, Ontario. The museum's administrative offices and scientific centres are housed at a separate location, the Natural Heritage Campus, in Gatineau, Quebec.
The Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) is a museum displaying many of the University of Oxford's natural history specimens, located on Parks Road in Oxford, England. It also contains a lecture theatre which is used by the university's chemistry, zoology and mathematics departments. The museum provides the only public access into the adjoining Pitt Rivers Museum.
Edward Hitchcock was an American geologist and the third President of Amherst College (1845–1854).
Anchisaurus is a genus of basal sauropodomorph dinosaur. It lived during the Early Jurassic Period, and its fossils have been found in the red sandstone of the Upper Portland Formation, Northeastern United States, which was deposited from the Hettangian age into the Sinemurian age, between about 200 and 192 million years ago. Until recently it was classed as a member of Prosauropoda. The genus name Anchisaurus comes from the Greek αγχιanchi-; "near, close" + Greek σαυρος ; "lizard". Anchisaurus was coined as a replacement name for "Amphisaurus", which was itself a replacement name for Hitchcock's "Megadactylus", both of which had already been used for other animals.
The Burpee Museum of Natural History is located along the Rock River in downtown Rockford, Illinois, United States, at 737 North Main Street.
The UW–Madison Geology Museum (UWGM) is a geology and paleontology museum housed in Weeks Hall, in the southwest part of the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. The museum's main undertakings are exhibits, outreach to the public, and research. It has the second highest attendance of any museum at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, exceeded only by the Chazen Museum of Art. The museum charges no admission.
The Museum of the Earth is a natural history museum located in Ithaca, New York. The museum was opened in 2003 as part of the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), an independent organization pursuing research and education in the history of the Earth and its life. Both PRI and the Museum of the Earth are formally affiliated with Cornell University. The Museum of the Earth is home to Earth science exhibits and science-related art displays with a focus on the concurrent evolution of the Earth and life.
The Connecticut River Valley trackways are the fossilised footprints of a number of Early Jurassic dinosaurs or other archosauromorphs from the sandstone beds of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The finding has the distinction of being among the first known discoveries of dinosaur remains in North America.
The Hitchcock Ichnological Cabinet is a collection of fossil footmarks assembled between 1836 and 1865 by Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864), noted American geologist, state geologist of Massachusetts, United States, and President of Amherst College. He was one of the first experts in fossil tracks. A footmark impression in stone is a petrosomatoglyph.
The Idaho Museum of Natural History (IMNH) is the official state natural history museum of Idaho, located on the campus of Idaho State University (ISU) in Pocatello. Founded in 1934, it has collections in anthropology, vertebrate paleontology, earth science, and the life sciences. Additionally, it contains an archive of documents and ethnographic photographs.
The University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH) is a natural history museum of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States.
The Geological Museum of the State Geological Institute is a museum in Warsaw, Poland. The museum was established in 1919.
Ornithichnites is an ichnotaxon of mammal footprint that was originally classified as a dinosaur. The name was originally used by Edward Hitchcock in 1836 as a higher group name rather than a specific ichnogenus, and thus the name does not have priority over specific ichnogeneric names even if they were first identified as Ornithichnites. Only two ichnospecies exist: O. crassus and O. argenterae.
The Jurassic Museum of Asturias is located in the area of Rasa de San Telmo near the parish of Llastres in the municipality of Colunga, Asturias, Spain. Though the municipality of Ribadesella was initially proposed, Colunga was chosen for the building site in the late 1990s. Several landmarks are visible from the museum including the Bay of Biscay, the Sierra del Sueve, and the Picos de Europa. Strategically located over a mount on the Rasa de San Temo, the museum is in the midst the Jurassic Asturias.
Orra White Hitchcock was one of America's earliest women botanical and scientific illustrators and artists, best known for illustrating the scientific works of her husband, geologist Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864), but also notable for her own artistic and scientific work.
Paleontology in Massachusetts refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the U.S. state of Massachusetts. The fossil record of Massachusetts is very similar to that of neighboring Connecticut. During the early part of the Paleozoic era, Massachusetts was covered by a warm shallow sea, where brachiopods and trilobites would come to live. No Carboniferous or Permian fossils are known from the state. During the Cretaceous period the area now occupied by the Elizabeth Islands and Martha's Vineyard were a coastal plain vegetated by flowers and pine trees at the edge of a shallow sea. No rocks are known of Paleogene or early Neogene age in the state, but during the Pleistocene evidence indicates that the state was subject to glacial activity and home to mastodons. The local fossil theropod footprints of Massachusetts may have been at least a partial inspiration for the Tuscarora legend of the Mosquito Monster or Great Mosquito in New York. Local fossils had already caught the attention of scientists by 1802 when dinosaur footprints were discovered in the state. Other notable discoveries include some of the first known fossil of primitive sauropodomorphs and Podokesaurus. Dinosaur tracks are the Massachusetts state fossil.
The history of paleontology in the United States refers to the developments and discoveries regarding fossils found within or by people from the United States of America. Local paleontology began informally with Native Americans, who have been familiar with fossils for thousands of years. They both told myths about them and applied them to practical purposes. African slaves also contributed their knowledge; the first reasonably accurate recorded identification of vertebrate fossils in the new world was made by slaves on a South Carolina plantation who recognized the elephant affinities of mammoth molars uncovered there in 1725. The first major fossil discovery to attract the attention of formally trained scientists were the Ice Age fossils of Kentucky's Big Bone Lick. These fossils were studied by eminent intellectuals like France's George Cuvier and local statesmen and frontiersman like Daniel Boone, Benjamin Franklin, William Henry Harrison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. By the end of the 18th century possible dinosaur fossils had already been found.
Frederic Brewster Loomis was an American paleontologist. Educated at Amherst College and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, he spent his entire professional career at Amherst. His specialty was vertebrate paleontology. Many fossils he uncovered during his extensive field work are still exhibited at Amherst's Beneski Museum of Natural History. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Geological Society of America, and president of the Paleontological Society.
The 19th century in ichnology refers to advances made between the years 1800 and 1899 in the scientific study of trace fossils, the preserved record of the behavior and physiological processes of ancient life forms, especially fossil footprints. The 19th century was notably the first century in which fossil footprints received scholarly attention. British paleontologist William Buckland performed the first true scientific research on the subject during the early 1830s.