Stunning architecture and an exquisite collection make the Natural History Museum of Utah a worthy contender for your time. The new building in University of Utah’s Research Park called the Rio Tinto Center, which opened in 2011, is an amazing modernist interpretation of Utah’s natural world or simply put, organic architecture. I didn’t know until too late on the day of my visit that they offer tours of the architecture itself, so I may have to get back for that before leaving Utah in a month.
The museum focuses on Utah’s story of natural history and how humans fit into it, and the experience begins on the plaza leading to the front door as you journey through a timeline of geologic periods that will be represented inside.
After paying admission guests ascend into the Canyon, a large gathering space and central court of the museum that truly gives the feeling of being in a lovely red rock canyon common to southern Utah without looking like an actual canyon. In this space you’ll find a café, entrance kiosks, some interactive displays, gift shop and the Collections Wall with more than 500 objects from the museum’s collection artfully displayed to give an introduction to what the museum will share.
The layout of the museum takes visitors on a journey through the various expected areas in a natural history museum with several interactive exhibits and some outstanding exhibits. My favorite was the Past Worlds exhibit with its rich collection of fossils beautifully displayed. Utah has one of the richest fossil records in the United States, and this exhibit hall displays that so well.
One of the coolest is the wall of horned dinosaurs, all found in Utah. It is world’s largest display of horned (Ceratopsian) dinos and truly highlights the diversity of creatures that once roamed our earth. Also, exciting is the area dedicated to the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, which is a mystery to scientists. Part of the exhibit lets visitors learn the four major hypotheses of how the quarry formed and cast their vote. When I was there the drought theory was winning by a landslide.
On the scale of which exhibits I liked best, second to the dinosaurs, was the next major exhibit space highlighting the ancestral peoples of Utah. I especially loved the hands-on approach to this space letting people be tactile as they looked in cases with ancient artifacts. Third, was the Native Voices exhibit on the top floor sharing the history and culture and stories of Utah’s native people.
After perusing all but one exhibit, I met up with a friend and got special behind-the-scenes access to the paleontology lab and collections room. This was amazing! Both spaces are part of the museum experience for all visitors through observation windows, but being shown around inside was truly special, and I am very grateful to those who arranged it.
The paleo lab is where they clean and prepare fossils when they are brought in from dig sites. Most of the team working in this lab are volunteers. One of them gave us a tour. We saw bones of ancient beasts being cleaned and put together like jigsaw puzzles. He even let us touch a dino tooth that was found inside one of the other specimens. It was serrated.
One question I asked him is how many of the skeletons, bones, etc. on display in the exhibit hall were real fossils. If you don’t know, most things you see on display in these settings are generally not the actual bones, but models of them. The actual bones are too heavy and delicate to display without special reinforced structures and framing. Sorry to burst any bubbles.
I was delighted to hear that several of the displays had real bones including one skeleton of a duck-billed dino (Gryposaurus) that he said is approximately 80 percent all real fossil and the displays of fossils under your feet in certain areas including the Cleveland-Lloyd collection shown just as it was found. The Gryposaurus skeleton has a special, heavy duty structure supporting it that also allows individual bones to be removed for individual study if need be. This isn’t to say that the bones on display are made up. On the contrary, they are very good replicas of real pieces in the museum’s collections.
The next special access we got was into the collections room where the head of the paleontology collections showed us around. She told us some fascinating things and showed us some spectacular specimens. Of note, the museum has in its collection 48 holotypes. Those are the first ever found fossils of a newly identified species. This is very impressive, and makes the museum very important in paleontological studies since researchers go to the holotypes when researching specific species or comparing to identify new ones.
We were privileged to see some of these first-of-their-kind fossils including one that hasn’t been named yet. One additional interesting thing we saw is the inside of a mammoth’s tusk, which is hollow and looks like wood.
Now, the collections aren’t always off limits to the public. Beyond seeing them through the windows in the hall, the museum offers a special behind-the-scenes day for visitors to see much of the back hallways and rooms of the building providing a unique perspective and opportunity to how the museum works and its purpose.
After these special tours of the lab and collections, my friend and I visited the final exhibit hall with a temporary exhibit about mammals. On display are lots of fantastic ancient and modern mammals. The exhibit showcases the extreme adaptations of mammals from all time and places. Extreme Mammals closes on January 26.
Again, I’d recommend a visit to this fantastic museum, and I do on a regular basis with people I interact with at work just around the corner. Check out the museum’s website to learn more about upcoming exhibits and events and how you can plan your visit.
