The Persian Gulf is a mediterranean sea in Western Asia. The body of water is an extension of the Arabian Sea through the Strait of Hormuz and lies between Iran to the northeast and the Arabian Peninsula to the southwest. The Shatt al-Arab river delta forms the northwest shoreline.
The fauna of Australia consists of a huge variety of animals; some 46% of birds, 69% of mammals, 94% of amphibians, 93% of reptiles that inhabit the continent are endemic to Australia. This high level of endemism can be attributed to the continent's long geographic isolation, tectonic stability, and the effects of a unique pattern of climate change on the soil and flora over geological time. A unique feature of Australia's fauna is the relative scarcity of native placental mammals. Consequently, the marsupials – a group of mammals that raise their young in a pouch, including the macropods, possums and dasyuromorphs – occupy many of the ecological niches placental animals occupy elsewhere in the world. Australia is home to two of the five known extant species of monotremes and has numerous venomous species, which include the platypus, spiders, scorpions, octopus, jellyfish, molluscs, stonefish, and stingrays. Uniquely, Australia has more venomous than non-venomous species of snakes.
The Natural History Museum in London is a natural history 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 American Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain over 34 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum occupies more than 2 million square feet (190,000 m2). AMNH has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, and averages about five million visits annually.
The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. In 2016, with 7.1 million visitors, it was the eleventh most visited museum in the world and the most visited natural history museum in the world. Opened in 1910, the museum on the National Mall was one of the first Smithsonian buildings constructed exclusively to hold the national collections and research facilities. The main building has an overall area of 1.5 million square feet (140,000 m2) with 325,000 square feet (30,200 m2) of exhibition and public space and houses over 1,000 employees.
The Museum of Natural Sciences of Belgium is a museum dedicated to natural history, located in Brussels, Belgium. The museum is a part of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. Its most important pieces are 30 fossilised Iguanodon skeletons, which were discovered in 1878 in Bernissart, Belgium. The dinosaur hall of the museum is the world's largest museum hall completely dedicated to dinosaurs. Another famous piece is the Ishango bone, which was discovered in 1960 by Jean de Heinzelin de Braucourt in the Belgian Congo. The museum also houses a research department and a public exhibit department.
Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum in Santa Barbara, California.
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science is a municipal natural history and science museum in Denver, Colorado. It is a resource for informal science education in the Rocky Mountain region. A variety of exhibitions, programs, and activities help museum visitors learn about the natural history of Colorado, Earth, and the universe. The 716,000-square-foot (66,519 m2) building houses more than one million objects in its collections including natural history and anthropological materials, as well as archival and library resources.
The National Museum of Ireland – Natural History, sometimes called the Dead Zoo, a branch of the National Museum of Ireland, is housed on Merrion Street in Dublin, Ireland. The museum was built in 1856 for parts of the collection of the Royal Dublin Society and the building and collection were later passed to the State.
Wādī al-Ḥītān is a paleontological site in the Faiyum Governorate of Egypt, some 150 kilometres (93 mi) south-west of Cairo. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2005 for its hundreds of fossils of some of the earliest forms of whale, the archaeoceti. The site reveals evidence for the explanation of one of the greatest mysteries of the evolution of whales: the emergence of the whale as an ocean-going mammal from a previous life as a land-based animal. No other place in the world yields the number, concentration and quality of such fossils, as is their accessibility and setting in an attractive and protected landscape. The valley was therefore inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005.
The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS) is located in Raleigh, North Carolina as the oldest established museum in North Carolina and the largest museum of its kind in the Southeastern United States. With about 1.2 million visitors annually, as of 2013 it was the state's most popular museum or historic destination among visitors.
The Museum of Comparative Zoology is a zoology museum located on the grounds of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is one of three natural-history research museums at Harvard, whose public face is the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Harvard MCZ's collections consist of some 21 million specimens, of which several thousand are on rotating display at the public museum. The current director of the MCZ is James Hanken, the Louis Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard.
The Iziko South African Museum is a South African national museum located in Cape Town. The museum was founded in 1825, the first in the country. It has been on its present site in the Company's Garden since 1897. The museum houses important African zoology, palaeontology and archaeology collections.
The Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa is a natural history museum in the city of Pisa in Tuscany, Italy.
The Slovenian Museum of Natural History is a Slovenian national museum with natural history, scientific, and educational contents. It is the oldest cultural and scientific Slovenian institution.
The University of Iowa Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum on the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City, Iowa. The museum was founded in 1858 by instruction of the Iowa General Assembly as the Cabinet of Natural History. It is housed within Macbride Hall, located in the Pentacrest area of the university campus. The museum's collections contain around 140,000 objects, including approximately 31,000 birds, eggs, and nests, 5,000 mammal specimens, 41,000 insects, 44,000 other invertebrates, 6,000 archaeological specimens, and historical documents and images from the museum's history. The museum includes several galleries on Iowa's geological and cultural history, biological diversity, and environmental science, spanning four floors. Major research collections include the Kallam Collection of prehistoric stone tools, the Talbot and Jones Bird Collections, the Frank Russell Collection of Inuit and Native Arctic artifacts, and the Philippine Collection of ethnographic materials from the 1904 World's Fair.
Booth Museum of Natural History is a municipally-owned museum of natural history in the city of Brighton and Hove in the South East of England. Its focus is on Victorian taxidermy especially of British birds, insects, as well as fossils, bones and skeletons. It is part of "Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton and Hove". Admission to the museum is free.
The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is a natural history museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, located on the campus of the University of British Columbia. Its 20,000 square feet of collections and exhibit space were first opened to the public on October 16, 2010; since then it has received over 35,000 visitors per year.
The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Israel National Center for Biodiversity Studies at Tel Aviv University, is a natural history museum in Israel, including both education and a research center. It is the largest and most active center in Israel of documentation and science, focusing on biodiversity research and its varied applications including nature conservation, environmental protection, and agriculture.
Tianjin Natural History Museum is in Tianjin, China, and is located in No. 206 Machang Avenue, in the Hexi District. It was founded in 1914 as the Hoangho Paiho Museum. The museum has three floors and spans an area of 12,000 square meters. Over 380,000 geological and biological specimens are currently held at the museum.
