The museum has fake life-size figures of prehistoric man, dinosaur skeletons, and fossils galore. You’d think that all that stuff would cost a lot of money to reproduce and that the location scouts would choose to film the museum’s scenes in an actual museum to save money. In reality, Ross’ museum scenes were filmed on a Hollywood soundstage with sets constructed just for filming purposes.
When we first meet Ross, he’s an awkward A-type personality going through his first divorce. There aren’t a lot of good things going on in his life–Phoebe even tries to “cleanse his aura” of bad juju in the pilot episode–but he always has his career going for him! Any Friends fan knows that Ross has an impressive career in palaeontology.
For the first five seasons, Ross works at “The New York Museum of Prehistoric History.” You may remember this as the place where Ross and Rachel have a monumentally romantic date under the planetarium stars or where Joey gets hired as a tour guide and starts a mini revolution among workers in the cafeteria. Yes, that’s the same cafeteria where Ross had his infamous post-Thanksgiving sandwich (the “Moist Maker”) stolen.
If the series was actually filmed in New York City, it’s likely that the museum used would be the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Stop by there if you ever take a Friends-themed trip to NYC and feel like a true Geller!
