Museum of the Earth, Natural history museum in Ithaca, United States
The Museum of the Earth is a natural history museum in Ithaca, New York, with a collection centered on fossils, rocks, and the long history of life on our planet. The building is a modern structure designed to blend into the surrounding landscape near Cayuga Lake.
The museum opened in 2003, designed by the architecture firm Weiss/Manfredi, and grew out of the Paleontological Research Institution, which had been managing scientific collections in the Ithaca area since the 1930s. The new building gave those older collections a permanent public home for the first time.
The museum sits close to Cornell University, and many visitors come from the academic community to explore the exhibits alongside families and curious travelers. This mix gives the place a relaxed but thoughtful feel, where people of different backgrounds look at the same fossils with different eyes.
The museum is on the outskirts of Ithaca, close to the shores of Cayuga Lake, so it pairs well with a walk outside before or after the visit. Many exhibits are hands-on, which means you can touch specimens and interact with displays rather than just looking through glass.
The museum holds one of the few complete skeletons of a Desmostylus, a marine mammal that lived roughly 15 million years ago and is unlike any animal alive today. This specimen is rare because Desmostylus fossils are found so infrequently that even many paleontologists have never seen one in person.
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