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Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English. I’m June Simms. On our show this week, we tell play a few songs from new albums by Green Day, Mumford & Sons and Lupe Fiasco. We also tell about a Native American man working to help keep his culture alive. But first, we go to a New York City museum to learn about some eight legged creatures. What has eight legs, comes in forty-three thousand species and has a serious public image problem? If you said a spider, you are right! The spider family has lived on Earth for about three hundred million years. But it has had trouble making friends with people. A new show at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City hopes to improve those relations. Christopher Cruise has more. “Spiders Alive!” includes live examples of twenty different spider species. Visitors can get up close and personal with arachnids including the famed tarantula, the small but powerful black widow and the little known fishing spider. And there are many more spiders to learn about at the exhibition. The American Museum of Natural History claims the largest collection of the animals in the world. Most people think of spiders as insects. But insects have wings and antennae. Spiders do not. And spiders’ bodies are made up of two parts while insects have three. Finally, spiders, like all arachnids, have eight legs. Insects have six. | 
