Meeting Lucy

Ever since I read about Lucy in A short history about nearly everything, I wanted to visit the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). I never imagined it to happen this fast though.

AMNH, being 135 years old, is one of the greatest natural history museums in the world. A view from Central Park, NYC:

It consists of a dome planetarium, an IMAX theatre, several temporary exhibitions, in addition to the 45 exhibition halls that are open round the year. Here’s what makes it different: the Dinosaur hall, the Anne and Bernard Spitzer hall of Human Evolution, and the Earth and Space center. The whole museum is so big you can barely browse through the entire collection. You need to spend about 10 days to read the contents of all exhibits.

Here’s the view of the space center. Needless to say, things all over are sparkling clean and tidy. There are thousands of LCD screens in addition to exhibits all over, I truly don’t know how they break-even.

The Hall of Human Evolution is a major reason why I visited AMNH. The hall explains how life evolved (whatever science explains), how complex life originated, and how chimpanzees finally transformed into humans.

Here’s the prized Lucy – one of the best known fossils till date. Lucy is the ONLY fossil (3 million years old) ever found (in Africa) that explains the migration of human ancestors from trees to plains.


The Jurassic era…


What is really breathtaking about AMNH is the amount of detail that has went into each of the thousands of exhibits... here's one. The 3D representation is just spotless.


I did have some pleasant surprises as I came out. When I was strolling in the snow-covered Central Park, I found a beautiful snowman in a corner. I instantly named him Calvin!

And, as I was walking near the famous Madame Tussauds, I lost a moment of breath when I saw... one of my idols!

I couldn’t catch the New York rickshaws last time around, but this time I did. Watch the bottom left of the picture… a typical rickshaw, except that it looks much better. Women too drive rickshaws in NYC!

There is one other big reason to visit this place – the breathtaking dome planetarium that gives a thrilling ride through space and time. It was the biggest dome I had ever seen, but photography was unfortunately not allowed. My camera memory conking off half-way is another story...

Update 1: Since no one found it, I'll disclose this myself: The Morgan Freeman in the picture is his replica and not his actual self. You just can't see the difference until you are real upclose. :)