The Academy of Natural Sciences

As a recent transplant to Philadelphia, I have been trying to get out and see what my new home has to offer. I have passed dozens of cute shops and pop-up markets, visited the famed Italian Market and posh Rittenhouse Square, and will have much to write about in the coming weeks.

My lovely friends Iris and Jess visited me this weekend for our first, of many, Philadelphia Beautiful Ladies Weekends. We cooked and feasted, walked around the city, peered in shops, gorged on the famous local cheese steaks and visited the Art Museum Area.

I am an ardent fan of New York’s Museum of Natural History and was overjoyed to see Philadelphia’s counterpart to the museum in The Academy of Natural Sciences on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. My friend Jess and I visited the museum this Sunday and really enjoyed what they had to offer.

The Academy of Natural Sciences has a more condensed collection than the Natural History Museum and focuses mainly on the history and anatomy of animals, where the vast expanses of the New York museum include many cultural representations and archeological finds.

The Academy has a lovely collection of taxidermy specimen, many of which I have not seen at the Natural History Museum. The buffalo set up is beautiful, with a backdrop of billowy clouds and rolling yellow-green hills. A family of buffalo, young and old, find themselves grazing in the open fields where patches of tall dry grass are mingled with the green undergrowth.



I have always been incredibly fond of the diorama set-ups for animal specimen shared by both the Natural History Museum and the Academy of Natural Sciences. The miniature worlds allow visitors to experience the lives that these animals live; showing us environments that many of us will never have the opportunity to view first hand.

I particularly enjoyed the Academy’s setups because of the decentralization of the figures in the dioramas: just as in paintings, a centralized figure in a rectangle is typical and frequently iconic and powerful, however, moving the figure off the central axis allows for more movement and interaction between space and figure, creating narrative.



I was pleasantly surprised at the care, and frequently the complexity that was evident in the compositions of the different dioramas. Animal specimen were posed with family members and framed by trees and botanicals, frequently arching their backs to strike and once in a while interacting with the setups to the left and right: a lonely penguin watches a ship disappearing in the distance and a giant Moose stands guard over a group of deer a moment before they are attacked by a hungry cat!

I was at the Natural History Museum in New York, with my friend Tamar, only a week before this excursion and, to my sheer disappointment, found that I missed the annual butterfly exhibit. Since last November, I have been attempting to plan a trip to the Natural History Museum, hoping to see the butterflies and have a giant moth land on my head. Finally, as a non-resident of New York, I found the opportunity to visit the Museum again, yet I came two weeks too late.

I may have missed the butterfly season in New York, however I made it back just in time for it in Philadelphia. At last, my silly wish came true. Jess and I paraded around a room full of tropical foliage and plates of peeled bananas; pairs of wings found themselves hanging demurely off the feeding plates and hiding behind palm leaves. We met a lot of lovely butterflies and incredibly chubby moths, yet none of them seemed interested in landing on my head to provide the perfect facebook photo.



We watched several new butterflies come out of their chrysalis in the hatching chamber which was incredibly fun to watch and saw the keeper release them into the main butterfly chamber. Some did not want to leave, one landed on my dress! Success! We spent a half an hour or so walking around and meeting all of the specimen, and the majority of the time, my new friend spent sitting on my hip.



The Academy of Natural Sciences is a lovely museum: I am glad to have had the opportunity to explore it, and am sure I will be back frequently.