Mac Rating: 0.00 | Votes: | Date: 03/06/2026 15:19:00

In the historic City Park east of downtown Denver, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science is one of the largest natural-history museums in the western United States and the principal natural-history institution of the broader Rocky Mountain region. The museum traces its origins to 1900, when the pioneer Colorado naturalist Edwin Carter's celebrated taxidermy collection (assembled from years of personal field work throughout the Rocky Mountain wilderness) was acquired by the City of Denver and put on public display at the original Colorado Museum of Natural History in the recently completed City Park. The museum's present 716,000-square-foot building, the result of a long series of substantial expansions over more than a century, occupies the south-eastern corner of City Park overlooking the central park lake. The most recent major addition is the 2014 Anschutz Family Sky Terrace, a dramatic glass-walled rooftop gallery providing panoramic views of the surrounding park, the central downtown skyline and the distant Rocky Mountain Front Range across the western horizon. The museum's permanent collections include some 4.4 million catalogued natural-history specimens covering anthropology, zoology, geology, palaeontology and astronomy. The standout permanent exhibition is Prehistoric Journey, a four-billion-year chronological tour of life on Earth featuring more than a hundred original specimens including the celebrated Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops dinosaur skeletons recovered from major Colorado and Wyoming Cretaceous-era dig sites. The Edge of the Wild gallery covers the natural history of the Rocky Mountain region with a series of dramatic full-scale habitat dioramas, while the celebrated Egyptian Mummies permanent exhibition (one of the largest collections of authentic ancient Egyptian mummies in the western United States) covers the funerary practices and broader cultural history of ancient Egypt. The museum also operates one of the largest planetariums in the western United States, the celebrated Gates Planetarium, with daily programmes covering the night sky, deep-space astronomy and the broader history of space exploration. An IMAX theatre on the lower level shows daily large-format science and nature documentaries. The museum is open daily with combined planetarium-and-IMAX ticket packages available at modest additional cost.