New tonight: Museum Secrets on History Television – “Inside the American Museum of Natural History”

From dinosaurs to meteorites to the origins of the human species, the American Museum of Natural History houses 32 million objects, is visited by over 4 million people annually, and has a stellar research staff that mounts over 100 expeditions every year. In this episode, we meet an American farm boy whose love for Africa changed the image of African wildlife from scary to noble. We witness the mating rituals of a 400 million year old crab species whose unique blood harbours secrets crucial to modern medicine, then crack open a dinosaur egg to uncover a clue that overturns a long held misconception about a supposedly murderous species. We run a relay race through Manhattan to investigate whether Incan knotted strings were capable of carrying encrypted messages, then blast off on a space mission to bring back comet dust that may hold the secret of how life began on Earth. We also follow museum explorers as they capture animals to extract their DNA, to be preserved in the museum’s sub-zero storage facility – a blueprint of life for future generations.