Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Founded In 1900 Around One Breckenridge Taxidermist'S Collection Of Colorado Birds And Mammals, And Now Among The Most Visited Natural History Museums In The United States. Holds The Gates Planetarium, An IMAX Theatre And A Famous Set Of Habitat Dioramas. · Denver, Colorado

The Denver Museum of Nature and Science began with a dead-animal collection. Edwin Carter was a Breckenridge miner who gave up mining to document what the mining was destroying, and by the 1890s his cabin held thousands of Colorado birds and mammals; the city bought the lot and built a museum around it in 1900. What grew from that is now one of the most visited natural history museums in the country - a building on the edge of City Park with four floors of dioramas, dinosaurs, Egyptian mummies, a planetarium and an IMAX screen, and windows along its north side that frame a hundred and fifty miles of the Front Range. The dioramas are the thing serious visitors come for: painted backgrounds and mounted animals arranged with a care that modern museums rarely fund, and in several of them the background was painted on location by artists sent to the actual valley. The other thing worth knowing is that a drilling survey in the museum's own car park brought up a dinosaur bone from several hundred feet down, which is the sort of luck no institution can plan for.

2001 Colorado Boulevard, Denver, Colorado, 80205, United States

Open daily year-round during daytime hours, closing on a small number of major holidays. General admission covers the permanent exhibitions and the Phipps IMAX theatre and Gates Planetarium are ticketed separately or as an add-on. Special travelling exhibitions carry their own timed tickets and are the ones that sell out. Parking is in an on-site garage. The museum is busiest on winter weekends, on school holidays and on the free days it runs several times a year.

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