Cleveland Museum of Natural History - Definition and Overview

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum located approximately 5 miles (8 km) east of downtown Cleveland, Ohio in University Circle, a 500 acre (2 km²) 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.

Museum collections total more than four million specimens and include:

• extensive examples of Late Devonian Cleveland Shale fish
• 900 monkey and ape skeletons, and more than 3,100 human skeletons (the Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection)
• the only specimen of the small tyrannosaur Nanotyrannus lancensis
• the remains of Balto the sled dog [1] (http://www.cmnh.org/fun/balto.html)

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.

External link

Cleveland Museum of Natural History (http://www.cmnh.org)