NEW YORK (AP) — A cherished holiday tradition is set to make its annual return to Manhattan, bringing festive cheer to the city next week. While many eyes are on the iconic Rockefeller Center spruce, which will be illuminated in early December, there’s another tree nearby that has captured hearts for decades.

The Origami Holiday Tree at the American Museum of Natural History will once again be on display starting Monday. This vibrant 13-foot (4-meter) tree is a masterpiece of creativity, adorned with thousands of meticulously hand-folded paper ornaments crafted by origami enthusiasts from around the globe.

This year’s theme takes inspiration from the museum’s latest exhibition, “Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs.” It explores the cataclysmic asteroid event that took place around 66 million years ago, dramatically altering the course of life on our planet.

Co-designer Talo Kawasaki reveals that the tree’s theme, “New Beginnings,” symbolizes the new era that emerged after this mass extinction event. The artificial tree, strategically placed near the museum’s Central Park West entrance, is crowned with a striking golden asteroid, ablaze with fiery details.

Located off the museum’s Central Park West entrance, the artificial tree is topped with a golden, flaming asteroid.

Its branches and limbs are packed with origami works representing a variety of animals and insects, including foxes, cranes, turtles, bats, sharks, elephants, giraffes and monkeys. Dinosaur favorites such as the triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex are also depicted in the folded paper works of art.

“We wanted to focus more not so much the demise of the dinosaurs, but the new life this created, which were the expansion and the evolution of mammals ultimately leading to humanity,” Kawasaki explained on a recent visit.

The origami tree has been a highlight of the museum’s holiday season for more than 40 years.

Volunteers from all over the world are enlisted to make hundreds of new models. The intricate paper artworks are generally made from a single sheet of paper but can sometimes take days or even weeks to perfect.

The new origami pieces are bolstered by archived works stored from prior seasons, including a 40-year-old model of a pterosaur, an extinct flying reptile, that was folded for one of the museum’s first origami trees in the early 1970s.

Rosalind Joyce, the tree’s co-designer, estimates that anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 origami works are embedded in the tree.

“This year there’s a lot of stuff stuffed in there,” she said. “So I don’t count.”