Founded in 1920, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History was inspired by a group known as the "Arkites". In the 1830s, a small wooden building on Public Square was home to Cleveland's first natural history collections. Its two rooms were crowded with bird and mammal specimens, earning it the nickname "the Ark." The men who patronized the Ark were dubbed "Arkites." It was their passion for the natural sciences that caused the group of Clevelanders to establish the Museum. Today the Museum is a world-class destination for visitors and researchers, with labs and collections for scientists working in eleven disciplines, in a 200,000-square-foot facility featuring galleries, exhibit spaces, a new planetarium, observatory, outdoor live animal area and gardens with native Ohio fauna and waterfowl. Curators care for over four million specimens in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, botany, geology, paleontology, zoology and wildlife biology.

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