Located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the American Museum of Natural History is one of the largest and most acclaimed museums in the world. The Museum is comprised of over 20 interconnected buildings, housing exhibition halls, research laboratories, and its renowned library.

The museum contains over 32 million artifacts, has a scientific staff of more than 200, and sponsors over 100 special field expeditions each year.

Founded in 1869, the museum was originally housed in the Arsenal building in Central Park. The museum was founded by a distinguished group of business and civic leaders from New York and beyond. The founding of the Museum realized the dream of naturalist Dr. Albert S. Bickmore.

A one-time student of Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, Bickmore advocated for the creation of a natural history museum in New York. The plan won the support of the Governor of New York, John Thompson Hoffman, who signed a bill officially creating the American Museum of Natural History on April 6, 1869.

The cornerstone was laid for the Museum's first building in 1874. The original Victorian Gothic building, was designed by Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould. It was soon eclipsed by the south range of the Museum, designed by J. Cleaveland Cady, an exercise in rusticated brownstone neo-Romanesque, influenced by H. H. Richardson.

The entrance on Central Park West, the New York State Memorial to Theodore Roosevelt, completed by John Russell Pope in 1936, is an overscaled Beaux-Arts monument. The entrance leads to a vast Roman basilica, where visitors are greeted with a cast of a skeleton of a rearing Barosaurus defending her young from an Allosaurus.

The Museum is also accessible through its 77th street foyer, renamed the "Grand Gallery" and featuring a fully suspended Haida canoe. The hall leads into the oldest extant exhibit in the Museum, the hall of Northwest Coast Indians.