Natural History Museum of Utah
301 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, UT
Salt Lake City, UT
A copper-clad museum built into the Wasatch foothills, holding one of the great collections of Utah dinosaurs and telling the deep story of a state built on ancient life and rock.
The Natural History Museum of Utah is one of the finest natural history museums in the West, a dramatic copper-clad building set into the Wasatch foothills above Salt Lake City. Its galleries tell the deep story of Utah, from the dinosaurs that once roamed its ancient landscapes to the Native peoples who have lived here for thousands of years and the geology that built the whole region.
Utah is one of the richest places on earth for dinosaur fossils, and the museum's dinosaur hall reflects that, filled with skeletons and skulls unearthed from the state's own rock. But the museum reaches far beyond bones, into minerals, the Great Salt Lake, human history, and the living land, all in a building whose form deliberately echoes the layered rock of the mountains behind it.
What Guests Love
- A world-class hall of Utah dinosaurs, many found in the state's own fossil-rich rock
- The building itself, a copper-clad structure set into the hillside with sweeping valley views
- Thoughtful galleries on Utah's Native peoples, developed with the tribes themselves
- Rich exhibits on minerals, the Great Salt Lake, and the geology that shaped the region
Worth Knowing
- It sits up in the foothills on the university campus, so plan for the drive and the parking
- The galleries are large and detailed, so allow a good part of a day to see them well
- It can be busy on weekends and school holidays, and quieter on weekday afternoons
- The site connects to trails and Red Butte Garden nearby, easy to combine into one outing
Details
Salt Lake City, UT
Learn about Natural History Museum of Utah
A building shaped like the land
The museum's home, opened in the early 2010s, was designed to belong to its hillside site. Its exterior is wrapped in panels of copper, a metal mined in Utah, that will weather and change color over the years, and its form steps up the slope in layers meant to echo the bands of sedimentary rock exposed across the state. From its windows and terraces the whole Salt Lake Valley spreads out below.
Inside, the galleries are arranged to lead visitors upward and back through time, so that moving through the building becomes a kind of journey through Utah's past. The design won wide praise for weaving architecture, landscape, and exhibit together, making the building itself part of the story it tells about rock, time, and place.
Utah's dinosaurs
The museum's dinosaur hall is its showpiece, one of the great displays of its kind. Utah's badlands and quarries have yielded an extraordinary trove of fossils, and many of the skeletons and skulls here were dug from the state's own rock, including horned dinosaurs and other species first described from Utah finds. The hall arranges them to show how life changed across the ages of the dinosaurs.
The museum is also a working research institution. Its paleontologists lead field expeditions into Utah's fossil country each season, and the collections behind the scenes hold specimens studied by scientists worldwide. Exhibits pull back the curtain on that work, showing how a jumble of bones in the desert becomes a mounted skeleton and a piece of the scientific record.
The people of Utah
Beyond deep time, the museum tells the human story of Utah. Its galleries on the state's Native peoples were developed in partnership with the tribes themselves, and they present the living cultures of the Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Navajo, and Shoshone nations, as well as the earlier Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan peoples known from the state's archaeology.
Rather than treating Native history as something finished, the exhibits emphasize that these are contemporary peoples with continuing traditions, communities, and ties to the land. Objects, voices, and stories are presented with the involvement and consent of the nations they belong to, making this one of the more thoughtfully collaborative human-history galleries in the region.
Rock, water, and the living land
Other galleries range across the natural world of Utah. A minerals hall glitters with crystals and ores drawn from a state famous for its mining, and exhibits on the Great Salt Lake explore the strange, saline ecosystem that dominates the valley to the west, along with the ancient Lake Bonneville whose shorelines still ring the mountains.
The museum also connects to the outdoors around it. Trails run from its doors into the Wasatch foothills, and Red Butte Garden and Red Butte Canyon lie just beyond, so a visit can move naturally from the exhibits inside to the living landscape they describe. It is a place designed to send visitors back out to look at Utah with new eyes.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near Salt Lake City
Red Butte Garden
About 1 mile east
The state arboretum in the Wasatch foothills, with themed gardens, trails, and summer concerts.
University of Utah
Adjacent
The state's flagship university, with additional museums, a hospital, and foothill trails.
This Is the Place Heritage Park
About 2 miles south
A living-history park at the mouth of Emigration Canyon marking the pioneers' entry into the Salt Lake Valley.
Temple Square
About 5 miles west, a 15 minute drive
The historic heart of downtown Salt Lake City, with the temple grounds, gardens, and visitor centers.