Museum of Nature and Science

Profile

In 2006, a pair of Fair Park mainstays—the Dallas Museum of Natural History and The Science Place, both of which had been around for more than 60 years—merged with the Dallas Children’s Museum. The result was the Museum of Nature & Science, an expansive, multi-building institution with activities that can entertain the entire family for hours.

The Nature Building offers a massive collection of more than 200,000 items spanning 1.7 billion years of natural history, with artifacts and eco-facts that cover subjects you’ll recognize (geology and paleontology) and a few you might not (malacology and ichthyology). The Science Building is where kids get their hands dirty. The Texas Dinosaurs exhibit has a sand pit where kids can hunt for bones and relics; the ever-popular Van de Graaff generator, a big silver ball that sends waves of static electricity through your system, makes your hair stand on end. Don’t worry, though. It doesn’t hurt.

The Children’s Museum is ideal for curious kids with active imaginations. In five interactive galleries, little ones can learn about the properties of water, or they can see if they’ve got what it takes to work on a farm. Other permanent exhibits teach kids (and adults) about the inner workings of the human body, DNA sequences, outer space, sea creatures, land mammals, and beasts of the Ice Age (the skeleton of a 20,000-year-old mammoth is on display). Past special exhibits have included BodyWorld, Baseball As America, and the Science of Spying.

When your feet start to throb, find a cushy chair under the 79-foot domed screen in the IMAX Theatre, or take a seat beneath the stars in the only public planetarium in Dallas, complete with a Digistar 3 System.

In late 2009, the museum broke ground on a new state-of-the-art facility in Victory Park. With $185 million price tag and spanning nearly 180,000 square feet, the museum’s new home will provide a major upgrade that should be ready by early 2013.