
Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Museum Logo
The 'Cleveland Museum of Natural History' is a
natural history museum located approximately five miles (8 km) east of downtown
Cleveland, Ohio in
University Circle, a 550-acre (220 ha) concentration of educational, cultural and medical institutions. The museum was established in
1920 to perform research, education and development of collections in the fields of
anthropology,
archaeology,
astronomy,
botany,
geology,
paleontology, wildlife biology, and
zoology.
A famous scientist associated with the museum is
Donald Johanson, who was the curator of the museum when he discovered "
Lucy," the skeletal remains of the ancient
hominid ''
Australopithecus afarensis''. The current Curator and Head of the Physical Anthropology Department is
Yohannes Haile-Selassie.
In 2002, the new Fannye Shafran
Planetarium was built near the entrance to the museum, containing displays on the planets in the Solar System, and historical
instruments of exploration, such as
compasses and
astrolabes.
Exhibits
Museum collections total more than four million specimens and include:
★ Extensive examples of Late
Devonian Cleveland Shale fish.
★ Nine hundred
monkey and
ape skeletons, and more than 3,100 human skeletons (the
Hamann-Todd Collection).
★ The only specimen of the small
tyrannosaur ''Nanotyrannus lancensis''.
★ The
holotype of the ''
Haplocanthosaurus''
sauropod.
★ The most complete mount of a ''
Coelophysis bauri''.
★ The remains of
Balto the
sled dog.
★ An extensive
mineralogy collection that includes a
moon rock and the
Jeptha Wade gem collection.
Hamman-Todd Collection
The 'Hamann-Todd Collection' is a collection of more than 3100 human
skeletons and over 900 primate skeletons that were assembled starting in 1893. The collection was originally housed in
Western Reserve University Medical School; in a new medical building that was built. The first floor of this building contained the Hamann Museum of Comparative Anthropology and Anatomy. However, due to the costs of storing the bones the collection was transferred to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
The collection was started by Carl August Hamann. Its administration was taken over by T. Wingate Todd after Hamann was named dean of Case Western's medical school. Todd managed to assemble the great majority of the human skeletons in the collection, over 3000, before his death in 1938.
Reference
Skeletons Out of the Closet, , Kevin, Jones-Kern, Explorer,
External link
★
Cleveland Museum of Natural History