The American Museum of Natural History is a landmark of Manhattan's Upper West Side in New York, USA, at 79th Street and Central Park West. The museum has a staff of more than 1,200, and it sponsors over 100 special field expeditions each year.

The Museum was founded in 1869. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of the 26th US President, Theodore Roosevelt, was one of the founders.

The Museum's first home was the old Arsenal building in Central Park. In 1874, ground was broken for the present building, which occupies most of Manhattan Square.
The original neo-Gothic range (1874–1877), by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, who were collaborating with Frederick Law Olmsted in structures for Central Park, was soon eclipsed by the South range of the museum, by J. Cleaveland Cady, a robust exercise in rusticated brownstone neo-Romanesque, influenced by H. H. Richardson. A triumphal Roman entrance on Central Park West, (see illustration) completed by John Russell Pope in 1936, is an overscaled Beaux-Arts monument to Teddy Roosevelt. It leads to a vast Roman basilica, where the skeleton of a rearing Barosaurus defending her young from an Allosaurus, is not lost in the general monumentality.


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