The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an art museum located on the eastern edge of Central Park, along what is known as Museum Mile in New York City, which has a permanent collection containing more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, often referred to simply as “the Met,” is one of the world’s largest art galleries, and has a much smaller second location in Upper Manhattan, at “The Cloisters,” which features medieval art. 1850s.

Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. A number of notable interiors, ranging from 1st century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met’s galleries. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum, served as its first President, and the publisher George Palmer Putnam was its founding Superintendent. In 1873, occasioned by the Met’s purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities, the museum took up temporary residence at the Douglas Mansion on West 14th Street; after negotiations with the City of New York, the Met acquired land on the east side of Central Park, where it built its permanent home, a red-brick Gothic Revival stone “mausoleum” designed by American architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

As of 2007, the Met measures almost a quarter mile long and occupies more than two million square feet, more than 20 times the size of the original 1880 building.

Senckenberg Museum

The Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt is the largest museum of natural history in Germany. It is particularly popular with children, who enjoy the extensive collection of dinosaur skeletons: Senckenberg boasts the largest exhibition of large dinosaurs in Europe. One particular treasure is a dinosaur fossil with unique, preserved scaled skin. Also, the museum contains the world’s largest and diverse collection of stuffed birds of about 2000 specimens. In 2004 almost 400,000 people visited the museum.

The building that houses the Senckenberg Museum was erected between 1904 and 1907 outside of the center of Frankfurt in the same area as the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, which was founded in 1914. The museum is owned and operated by the Senckenberg Nature Research Society, which began with an endowment by Johann Christian Senckenberg.

Today visitors are greeted outside the building by large, life-size recreations of dinosaurs, which are based on the latest scientific theories on dinosaur appearance. Inside one can follow the tracks of a Titanosaurus, which have been impressed into the floor, towards its impressive skeleton on a sheltered patio. 

Attractions include a Parasaurolophus with its crest, a fossilized Psittacosaurus with clear bristles around its tail and visible fossilized stomach contents, and an Oviraptor. Big public draws also include the Tyrannosaurus rex, an original of an Iguanodon, and the museum’s mascot, the Triceratops.

Although the dinosaurs attract the most visitors due to their size, the Senckenberg Museum also has a large collection of animal exhibits from every epoch of Earth’s history. For example, the museum houses a large number of originals from the Messel pit: field mice, reptiles, fish, and a predecessor to the modern horse that lived about 50 million years ago and stood less than 60 cm tall.

Unique in Europe is a cast of the famous Lucy, an almost complete skeleton of the upright hominid Australopithecus afarensis. Historical cabinets full of stuffed animals are arranged in the upper levels; among other things one can see one of twenty existing example of the quagga, which has been extinct since 1883.