Beneski Museum of Natural History

Amherst College natural history museum with mammoth, mastodon, and dinosaur skeletons

A surprisingly grand three-storey natural history museum, free and open to the public on the Amherst College campus. The atrium is dominated by a complete mounted mammoth and a Cretaceous mosasaur skeleton, with a balcony of mounted skeletons running around above. The Hitchcock Ichnological Cabinet on the lower floor — Jurassic dinosaur footprints set into stone slabs — is the world-class collection.

The Rausch Mineral Gallery and the comparative anatomy displays are worth an hour each. Closed Mondays during the academic year; admission is free.

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A story
The museum's Jurassic dinosaur trackway collection — assembled by Amherst's 19th-century president Edward Hitchcock — is the largest in the world. Hitchcock thought the tracks had been left by enormous prehistoric birds, since dinosaurs had not yet been recognised as a distinct group. The footprints are still the cleanest record we have of the local Connecticut Valley Jurassic fauna.

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