Carnegie Museum of Natural History
this outstanding natural history museum sits in
the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that had
been started by Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie
in 1896 and still has an international reputation for its
outstanding research and is considered to be one of the best
five natural history museum in these United State. The museum
occupies 115,000 square feet of space that is divided into 20
galleries along with library, office spaces and a research
facility; with about 21 million specimens which means that only
about 10,000 can be shown at any one time, with one million
specimens catalogued in the online databases. At the end of
2008, the museum had welcomed 386,000 visitors and 63,000 school
groups. It would make history in 1899 when scientists from here
would discover the fossil remains of a diplodocus carnegii, and
currently its spectacular dinosaur collection contains the
world's biggest collection of Jurassic dinosaurs and the third
biggest collection of mounted and displayed dinosaurs in the
country. Some of the most significant include the skull of
Samson, the most complete tyrannosaurus rex skull that has been
found to date and the new, still unnamed, species of
oviraptorosaur; and just recently their scientists has unearthed
the fruitafossor windscheffeli. A few of the other outstanding
major exhibits include the Alcoa Foundation Hall of American
Indians, the Powdermill Nature Reserve, the Hillman Hall of
Minerals and Gems, Polar World, Wyckoff Hall of Arctic Life and
the Walton Hall of Ancient Egypt. The Powdermill Nature Reserve
was started by the museum in 1956 to serve as its field station
for long-term studies that relate to natural populations. The
research staff has been organized into different departments
that include; vertebrate paleontology, anthropology, birds,
botany, invertebrate zoology, Powdermill Nature Reserve,
minerals, herpetology, mollusks, invertebrate paleontology,
mammals and paleobotany.
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