The New Guinea Expedition (1928-1929) was proposed by Leonard C. Sanford to employ Rollo H. Beck on the heels of his departure from the Whitney South Sea Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. The field work was funded by George F. Baker with the purpose of collecting birds in New Guinea for the AMNH. Rollo Beck, joined by his wife, Ida Beck, collected a total of 249 bird species during their eight-and-a-half months in three main collecting sites located in Northeast¬¬ New Guinea: the Madang area, Keku, and the Cromwell Mountains. Beck brought back a new species of bowerbird, Sericulus bakeri, collected near the Adelbert Mountains. The Becks arrived in Madang on August 15, 1928 and left for Australia on May 4, 1929.
Expedition. Robert E. Peary's final attempt to transport the Ahnighito meteorite, also known as The Tent, to New York. With a "one-hundred-ton and two thirty-ton jacks and ample supples of railroad iron and great timbers," Peary was determined to win (Hovey). The meteorite was brought to the Brooklyn Navy Yard aboard the S.S. Hope in the autumn of 1897.
Expedition. The Vernay-Cutting Expedition to Burma was organized for the purpose of collecting zoological and botanical specimens for the AMNH, the New York Botanical Garden, the Kensington Museum of London (probably the British Museum of Natural History), Kew Gardens, and the Bombay Natural History Society. The international staff included co-leaders and AMNH trustees Arthur Stannard Vernay and Charles Suydam Cutting, AMNH mammalogist Harold E. Anthony, and British scientists J. K. Stanford, ornithologist, and F. Kingdon Ward, botanist. (From AMNH Research Library catalog record for Film Collection no. 167)
Expedition. Carl Akeley organized the Akeley Expedition to British East Africa (1909-1911) to collect large game, especially elephants, for the American Museum of Natural History and to photograph the flora, fauna and inhabitants of the region.
The Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy African Hall Expedition was a collecting expedition to
Africa; its mission was to provide specimens for the African Hall at the American Museum of
Natural History, originally conceived in 1910. The man behind both the exhibit hall and the
expedition was Carl Ethan Akeley, an animal sculptor and taxidermist, an inventor, naturalist
and photographer. The Eastman-Pomeroy expedition focused on collecting specimens for the
dioramas of the African Hall, as well as accessories such as grass and bushes, and the creation
of background paintings from artists William Leigh and Arthur August Jansson.
The American Museum Expedition of Cretaceous Dinosaur Beds in Alberta (1910-1915) was led by Barnum Brown to explore the Cretaceous beds of Alberta, Canada, along the Red Deer River and Edmonton formation. Brown collected fossil specimens, new or little known at the time, including crested and horned dinosaurs. This was one of three major Vertebrate Paleontology expeditions in North America carried out by the American Museum of Natural History at the turn of the 20th century.