San Diego Natural History Museum

The San Diego Natural History Museum was founded in 1874 and is the second oldest scientific institution west of the Mississippi. The facility is located in Balboa Park and was dedicated in 1933.

In 1991, the addition of the new wing to the museum provided a significant increase with five new exhibition halls and a new theater complex.

The museum’s research collections include:

Birds and Mammals – the department’s taxonomic coverage now include 90% of the world’s bird families and 58% of its mammal families.
Botany – its herbarium houses a research collection of 250,000 specimens.
Entomology – the insect collection includes over 900,000 specimens.
Herpetology – the amphibians and reptiles include over 76,000 cataloged specimens.
Marine Invertebrates – about 5 million specimens concentrated on mollusks and crustaceans.
Mineralogy – the collection maintains 26,000 cataloged specimens of minerals, meteorites, and gems.
Paleontology – the collections include fossil vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants primarily of Mesozoic to Cenozoic-age.

The museum also has over a thousand watercolors of California plants painted in the early 1900s.

The San Diego Natural History Museum serves as the significant biodiversity repository in the region, conducting field research across a range of scientific disciplines.

Highlights of the San Diego Natural History Museum

“The Fossil Mysteries” exhibition traces the 75-million-year fossil-rich prehistory of southern California and Baja California, Mexico
Display of fossils, dioramas, murals, and models, that chronicle the evolution, extinction, ecology, and Earth processes from the age of the dinosaurs
“Coast to Cactus in Southern California” exhibit highlights the region’s biodiversity
“A History of Citizen Science” exhibit
The “Cool Stuff” exhibit
The “Plant Portraits” exhibit
The Research Library