Cleveland Museum of Natural History
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The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum located approximately five 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. The Shafran Planetarium was added to the museum in 2002.
Museum collections total more than four million specimens and include:
- Extensive examples of Late Devonian Cleveland Shale fish.
- Nine hundred 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 holotype of the Haplocanthosaurus sauropod.
- The remains of Balto the sled dog.
- An extensive mineralogy collection that includes a moon rock and the Jeptha Wade gem collection.
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.