Author(s): American Museum Of Natural History

Gift Books

The AMNH is one of the world's preeminent natural history museums and research institutions. Its collections contain more than 32 million specimens of plants, humans, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites and human cultural artifacts. Its complex houses 45 permanent exhibition halls, as well as the Hayden Planetarium, and a library; The AMNH Card Deck is a collection of 100 treasures, hand-selected by the museum's curators that represent its most fascinating, iconic, and wide-ranging artifacts; The content is culled from each of the museum's major areas of exhibition including Bird-Reptiles, and Amphibian Halls; Earth and Planetary Science Halls; Fossil Halls; Human Origins and Cultural Halls; Mammal Halls; Biodiversity and Environmental Halls; and the Hayden Planetarium;Artifacts in the card deck include the Star of India, the largest sapphire in the world; the Cape York Meteorite, discovered in Greenland in 1894; the Haida Canoe, built in 1878 by the Indians of the Pacific Northwest and carved from a single piece of wood, the trunk of a large cedar tree; the Blue Whale, a fiberglass replica of a 94-foot whale caught in 1925 off South George Island and one of the most popular exhibits in the museum; the Peregrine Falcon diorama; the Warren Mastodon skeleton, the first complete mastodon skeleton discovered in the United States, it was found in 1945, just 100 miles from New York City; Each card includes a full-bleed photograph of the object on the front and a 200-word description of the objects on the back that tells of the origin and age of the object and its scientific and historic significance. The organization of the cards within the deck follows that of the museum's exhibits.