Natural History Musuem

Natural History Museum Being a Biology Major, I was not surprised at how excited I was about visiting the Natural History Museum. No matter how much I study biology, I am still amazed by the cleverness of Mother Nature. I have always enjoyed art and attending museum that expose things created by humans as this allows me to witness the creativity of humans and their different perspectives on life. Beauty means different things to different people but in the case of nature, beauty is what is practical. Everything in nature has one purpose and this is to survive. Every single bone in our bodies and every part of our cells was carefully selected by nature. This phenomenon, also known as natural selection, is discussed in Charles Darwin’s book On the Origins of Species. His observations helped us understand evolution. His theories were radical for his time since he explained how all animals come from a common ancestor. Before this, we had always believed ourselves to be a better species that all others. At first, we believed ourselves to be unique because of our relationship with God. Later on, this feeling of self-worth came from the fact that we believed we had much greater intellectual abilities than other animals. Our huge error in believing so becomes more evident as we walk through the museum. After taking anatomy and physiology last semester, I found our visit to The Galeries de Paléntologie et d’Anatomie Comparée very interesting. This place was full with skeletons and organs from many different animals. I was especially astonished to see how similar the organs of all animals are to the ones found in humans. We can see these huge similarities because they are all trying to survive long enough to pass on their genes to future generation. It is even more striking to compare the skeleton and organs of chimps to humans. The similarities are so great that it is not difficult to believe the theory of evolution. Standing in front of all of those remains, one could not doubt the fact that we have a common ancestor. After looking at the first floor, we proceeded to the second floor were the bones of dinosaurs are located. I had never had the opportunity to see the remains of dinosaurs and it was amazing to think that those creatures walked on theearth more than 65 million years ago. Dinosaurs were wiped out by the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event which is believed to have been caused by an asteroid. This made me reflect on what Biologist E.O. Wilson said about humans being the greatest meteorite to hit the earth. We are definitely having a similar effect on the earth by contaminating and destroying it. Hopefully we will be able to reverse the damage we have caused the earth so that many more generations of not just humans but of every living species can enjoy it.