Bronx Zoo

Members of the Boone and Crockett Club — principally Madison Grant and C. Grant LaFarge — founded the New York Zoological Society in 1895, four years before the zoo opened. William Temple Hornaday served as its first director for thirty years. As of 2010 the collection held about 4,000 animals of 650 species, and the zoo recorded 2.1 million average yearly visitors as of 2009.

Heins & LaFarge designed the original permanent buildings as Beaux-Arts pavilions around a circular sea lion pool. That group, Astor Court, was designated a New York City landmark on June 20, 2000, an attempt in 1966 having failed. Paul Manship's Rainey Memorial Gates, dedicated in 1934 as a memorial to the big-game hunter Paul James Rainey, were designated a New York City landmark on January 11, 1967 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. The Rockefeller Fountain was designated on February 20, 1968, and the Zoo Center — built in 1908 in Beaux-Arts style as the Elephant House — was landmarked in 2000.

The American Bison Society was founded in 1905, and in 1913 fourteen bison were sent from the zoo to Montana's National Bison Range and to Wind Cave National Park. The zoo was the first in the United States to exhibit shoebills and Komodo dragons, both in 1926, and the first in North America to exhibit an okapi, in 1937. It held four thylacines between 1902 and 1919; the last died on September 13, 1919.

Congo Gorilla Forest opened in 1999 over 6.5 acres, with a visitor trail about a third of a mile long and some 400 plant species, and had taken 7 million visits by 2009. Western lowland gorillas share it with okapis, red river hogs, mandrills, Congo peafowl, African pygmy geese, western long-tailed hornbills, fire skinks and Nile monitors; it is open March through December, with indoor viewing when the weather is colder. JungleWorld shows the jungles of Asia, its residents including white-cheeked gibbon, Indian gharial, tapir, Asian small-clawed otters, Rodrigues fruit bats and silver leaf langur, and the Wildlife Conservation Society works with the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust Center for Herpetology on gharial conservation connected to it.

Himalayan Highlands opened on June 27, 1986. The Gelada Reserve, originally the Baboon Reserve, opened in 1990 and won an Association of Zoos and Aquariums exhibit award in 1991; Tiger Mountain opened on May 15, 2003 and won one in 2004. Madagascar! opened on June 20, 2008 in the former Lion House, which had opened in 1903. World of Darkness, which the zoo's own account calls the world's first major exhibit designed specifically for nocturnal animals, opened in 1969, closed in 2009 amid budget cuts and reopened on July 12, 2025.