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Mammals of North America exhibits and permanent collections in the museum. Guide and description for visitors.    
 
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American Museum of Natural History .

SECOND FLOOR
SOUTHEAST WING
MAMMALS OF NORTH AMERICA

As the visitor leaves the elevator on the second floor of the American Museum of Natural History he faces an admirable painting, "Polaris in Thank God Harbor," by William Bradford. At the immediate left is a portrait of von Humboldt by Julius Schrader. Turning to the right of the elevators, the giant moose of Alaska is the first object to catch the eye. On each side in the west wall cases are groups of small mammals found within fifty miles of New York: opossum, the only common North American representative of the order of marsupials, or pouched mammals, raccoon, red fox, muskrat, mink, skunk, woodchuck, porcupine and gray squirrel. The furs of nearly all these animals are used commercially.

The first large group in the center of the hall is that of the moose, in a setting representing an early autumn scene in a second-growth forest.'" This is followed by a group illustrating the color phases of the black bear and by the Lynx and Otter Groups. Adjoining these is a large group of American bison, on a mounting of a typical bit of prairie traversed by buffalo trails, and near-by a group of the Atlantic walrus.

On the south side of the hall are excellent groups of the collared peccary from Mexico, also groups of caribou and musk-ox, which furnish food and clothing to the natives and explorers of the far North, antelope and deer, wild boar from the Black Forest of Germany, polar bear, Stone's mountain sheep from Alaska and bighorn sheep from Montana.

On the north side, the Roosevelt elk or wapiti may be found, followed by groups of Rocky Mountain goat; heaver, showing these industrious little animals busy cutting trees for building dams and houses and the interior of one of their homes; many species of rats, mice, ground squirrels, foxes, bats, coyotes, panthers; an excellent reproduction of a fur seal rookery in the Pribilof Islands, where our government seal fisheries are located; weasels in their summer and winter coats; the ferocious grizzly bear of the western United States, and the huge Kadiak bear of the Alaskan Peninsula.

Suspended from the ceiling is a model of a seventy-six foot sulphurbottom whale.

The Southeast Pavilion in the American Museum of Natural History, is used as a workroom for the preparation of African elephants and other mammals. Proceed to the

 

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