"Extreme Mammals" on display

Video

Play VideoShanghai sparkles over diamond jewelry expo Play VideoShanghai book show on exotic animals

The American Museum of Natural History has gone to the extreme with a new exhibition in New York of the most amazing mammals of all time.

"Extreme Mammals: The Biggest, Smallest and Most Amazing Mammals of All Time" explore the surprising and bizarre world of man's mammalian relatives.

Featuring fossils from the Museum's collections, the exhibit examines the ancestry and evolution of numerous species, from the gigantic to the smallest; the fastest to the most sloth-like, and those with extreme claws, fangs, snouts and horns.

Exhibition curator John Flynn said, "Well, we have an incredible exhibit about us. . . about our group. We're mammals and we have a chance to look at not only at things that are out there today that we know like foxes and koalas, but things that lived in ancient past that we're not as familiar with."

Flynn's team created replicas and put together fossils of such bizarre creatures as the extinct Macrauchenia which lived 10,000 years ago in South America. The creature had a camel-like body, a giraffe-like neck, and a nose like an elephant, only shorter. Researchers figured out that Macrauchenia had such a unique nose not by finding remnants of the actual trunk - the soft tissue of the trunk wouldn't have lasted 10,000 years. But by comparing earlier skulls of members of the earlier Macrauchenia to later ones, scientists noticed that over thousands of years, the nasal cavity moved back towards the top of the head, as a new species evolved.

John Flynn said, "What's challenging about putting any exhibition together is having it filled with information so that you can explore and learn something you didn't know before. At the same time making it exciting and interesting, and something that you really want to go see because it's different than anything else you'd be able to do."

The exhibit opens on the weekend and runs until January next year.