Beneski Museum of Natural History

The museum contains three floors of exhibits and over 1700 individual specimens on display. Highlights include: The first (entrance floor) features a variety of displays on vertebrate evolution and extinction, including free standing fossil skeletons of a mammoth, mastodon, dire wolf, saber-toothed cat, Irish Elk and cave bear. Fossils from Amherst College expeditions to Patagonian and the American west are exhibited, in additional to recently extinct birds such as the moa and the ivory billed woodpecker. The second floor demonstrates the occurrence of geological phenomena in the Connecticut River Valley including mountain building and glaciation, as well as local animal and plant fossils, and a small exhibit on human evolution and teeth. The ground floor displays the world's largest collection of dinosaur tracks (primarily from the Connecticut River Valley), skulls of a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Triceratops and a diorama with a model showing what some of our local dinosaur species might have looked like. There is also a cast of a dinosaur track "book" that visitors can handle.