New York Museum of Natural History

The New York Museum of Natural History, located in Central Manhattan at West 72nd Street, is a major setting for several Preston-Child books including Relic, Reliquary, and The Book of the Dead. The museum is huge, comprising one million square feet of space including five miles of forced-air ducts and a multi-level subbasement containing a network of unmapped tunnels, some of which were built to drain the artesian swamp that lies under the oldest museum buildings.

Locations in the Museum

 * Loading Dock
 * Staff Entrance
 * Guard Pillbox: Usually manned by Curly
 * Anthropology Department: Located in the Old Building basement, off a long corridor from the internal courtyard containing the staff entrance
 * Peruvian Gold Hall
 * Staff Lounge: Location of the initial NYPD briefing to the museum staff about the Museum Beast Murders
 * Old Building Basement: Home to the Anthrolopology Department, where the first two Museum Beast Murders bodies (of Billy and his younger brother) are discovered by Charlie Prine
 * Great Rotunda: Site of the first public museum press conference about the Museum Beast Murders
 * Director's Office
 * Broadway: A wide corridor connecting staff offices and labs, six city blocks long and said to be the longest hallway in New York City


 * Margo's Office: A desk and a bookshelf tucked into one of the anthropology department labs containing South Seas artifacts
 * Dr. Frock's Office: On the fifth floor of the South Tower, in an area of the museum described as "Edwardian" with elegant furnishings, Persian carpets, and oak doors.


 * Subbasement
 * Subbasement Corridor, leading away from the Old Building Basement area where Billy and his brother's corpses were found; site of a confrontation between two police dogs and Mbwun
 * Drainage tunnels
 * Mbwun's Lair


 * Secure Storage Area
 * Bug Room
 * Dinosaur Storeroom 4 - Upper Jurassic - located in the basement so that the weight of the heavy bones do not cause the floor to collapse
 * 6th Floor Vaults - built directly under the museum's roof, presumably the top floor of that part of the museum. These are a series of catwalks lined with low doors providing access to hermetically sealed vaults.
 * Lavinia Rickman's Office, with green walls and decorated with a variety of artifacts borrowed from the museum's collections.
 * Herbarium
 * Dr. Wright's Offce: Probably on the fifth floor, oak-panelled with a pressed tin ceiling, a massive carved limestone fireplace, and a large Audubon painting of snowy egrets.
 * Section 28, contains a freight elevator the size of a studio apartment
 * Osteological preparation area (a.k.a. the "Bug Room"): An area of the museum where animal specimens are boiled or eaten by beetles to render clean skeletons for mounting
 * Selous Memorial Hall: An area adjacent to where the Superstition Exhibition is being staged.
 * Walker Gallery: Another area adjacent to the rear entrance to the Superstition Exhibition
 * Hall of Insects
 * Marine Hall: A two-level gallery. The two levels are connected by large twin staircases. The lower level has a granite floor and several dioramas from the 1930s and 1940s including a group of walruses and a model of a coral reef.
 * Weisman Gallery: A gallery used for temporary exhibitions - part of the Superstition Exhibition was located here.

Real-Life Influences
The museum is a fictionalized version of the real American Museum of Natural History, where co-author Douglas Preston worked as a staff writer. Many of the concepts of the early Preston-Child novels were taken from real museum expeditions and events, as described in Preston and Child's first collaboration, Dinosaurs in the Attic