How Many Bones Are at the American Museum of Natural History?
How Many Bones Are at the American Museum of Natural History? Monday May 11, 2009 There was an interesting item in yesterday’s New York Times about the huge number of fossils at the American Museum of Natural History. According to writer Michael Pollak, a 1986 history of the museum stated that “if all the bones were dumped into Central Park, they would form a pile well over three stories high and hundreds of feet in circumference…the pile would weigh at least 1,000 tons and contain about 50 million bones, representing the remains of more than 750,000 animals.” Since that book was written over 20 years ago, feel free to tack on another 20 or 30 percent to those figures. Where in the world does AMNH keep all those fossils? I’d like to think there’s an abandoned West Side subway tunnel filled with assorted skulls, femurs and
