and all i have to do is act naturally

There is something unnatural about the American Museum of Natural History. Don't get me wrong, it's a very cool place. You'd be remiss to visit New York and skip it. But there is something odd and even a little unsettling about the museum. At least that's how it seemed to us.

Walking through the Hall of African Mammals, we got our first look at the famous dioramas. Zebras drink from a watering hole. A lion pride surveys a field, looking for its next meal. Massive elephants dominate the center of the room. It was exactly what I had expected, yet somehow it felt strange.

Living in San Diego means I have visited its zoo more times than I can count. I'm used to seeing animals behind glass, they're just usually moving. But when you really think about it, aren't zoos just as weird, if not more so? Is it better to take a dead animal and pose it for eternal display, or remove a live one from its environment and confine it to a cage for the rest of its life? Neither is a true example of how the animal looks and acts in the wild.

The rest of the museum (save for the fourth floor, where they keep the dinosaurs and other fossils) feels just as strange, almost like stepping back in time or into a Wes Anderson movie. Artifacts are displayed in the most straight forward way; lined up in orderly fashion within glass display cases, or placed on mannequins. No muss, no fuss.

While my 20th/21st century eye sees this as dated, it was actually ahead of its time in the 1920s and 1930s when the museum was really taking shape. Great care and detail were used in creating the taxidermy dioramas, creating displays that sharply contrasted with the rigid stuffing typically used at the time. The display on evolution was the only major American exhibition of its kind in 1921. The AMNH worked closely with cultural anthropologists Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, who both revolutionized the field.

The American Museum of Natural History isn't the flashiest, but it is itself a slice of New York history. When you view the dioramas, you are viewing the same display seen by visitors over 70 years ago. You are walking in the footsteps of New York's rich and poor, old and young, tourists and locals.