American Museum of Natural History

This guide to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City centers on the blue whale suspended overhead in the Hall of Ocean Life, a model that opened to record crowds in February 1969. It traces how the museum built the sculpture from little more than old photographs of a whale carcass found off South America in 1925, with no living animal to measure and no skeleton to cast, aiming to outdo the papier-mache model it replaced. Best taken in from a bench across the hall, looking straight up.