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North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences
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12 reviews for North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences
This is a GREAT museum!!! Considered one of the top 10 natural history museums in the U.S.! A huge and under-appreciated asset in this state! I've been to great museums in D.C. and NYC, and this holds it's weight!
You wanna know what else makes it great!?! FREE ADMISSION!! We paid $3.00 for 3 hours of parking, but that was it! Four stories of fantastic exhibits and displays, and engaging staff (mostly).
There is (was) a traveling exhibit about chocolate, that is a $7 charge. The staff was honest enough to tell us it wasn't really appealing to kids, as it was mostly reading, and not demos of chocolate making.
I would highly recommend to ANYONE visting the Raleigh area! Big plus!
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We had a blast here! We went on a Wednesday afternoon and it wasn't crowded at all, which was nice. It was incredible that this museum is free for the public. I'm afraid to say we lost our last shreds of dignity posing with the statues and making faces in front of the exhibits. But it was absolutely worth it.
There was a huge variety of exhibits, from dinosaurs to sea life to plant life. They even had a whole section dedicated to bugs (NOT my favorite, but Daniel had fun making me look at the cockroaches). Where else can you touch a 4.5 billion year-old meteorite and then stick your head into the jaws of a T-Rex - all in the same room? The overlying theme through the museum seemed to be North Carolina: what the state can boast (largest salamander variety, oldest river in America), what snakes are local to the area, what animals live here, etc. NC has a wide variety of species because of the climate, so there's plenty to learn about.
This place also boasts the most complete set of Acro bones (and there have been only three sets found, unlike T-Rex, which has about 30 sets). The dinosaur exhibits were definitely a favorite with us. They were dynamic and very informative, and they made for the best photos.
Wow, after going to the art museum and the history museum I really wasn't expecting this museum to be so large. Four huge floors of exhibit after exhibit and it was all free! We ended up spending two hours here and didn't even see everything. Our favorites were the whale skeletons and the butterfly atrium on the top floor.
We got here right after they opened on Saturday morning, which I recommend as it gets crowded (in the museum and the free parking lot) pretty quickly. Their museum cafe didn't look half bad either, pricewise, which was a surprise since museum cafes are usually a huge rip off. Definitely recommend if you've got a few hours to kill in Raleigh.
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What a gorgeous and thorough natural science museum!
Great dino exhibits, great sea mammal (read: giant whale skeletons!) exhibits, great local ecology exhibits... great, great, great!
Something I've really come to love about Raleigh is the wealth of free, yet QUALITY, diversions the city offers. The NC Museum of Natural Sciences totally delivers.
It is spread out over 4 levels, each level very manageable. The museum as a whole is easy to navigate, very informative, and really a whole lot of fun. It won't take a full afternoon to conquer, but give it a couple of hours, and you'll come away quite satisfied!
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The Natural Science Museum is fine, I suppose. They have lots of cool dinosaur skeletons, and the whale of course - always a favorite. It just doesn't seem to come together at any point and make an interesting experience out of the collection of things on display.
I feel like this museum is set up entirely for the public school field-trips that come through it. Everything is tailored to fit specific aspects of some natural sciences curriculum, and so there's nothing that would be really interesting to someone who's already graduated from middle school.
They do sometimes have interesting temporary exhibits, though. And Bug Day is always hilarious - though crowded with even more middle-schoolers than usual.
Advice: do not go on the top floor. That's where the cafeteria is, and it's a nightmare world of screeching youngsters and overpriced food.
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If you're looking for a fun and educational way to kill a day without killing your savings, I'd highly recommend checking out the Museum of Natural Science.
I've been here several times and I'm always amazed by the skeletons. The museum has the only dinosaur skeleton in the world that contains an actual fossilized heart. I'd never heard of this (despite my continued obsession with all thing dinosaur related) and I was intrigued to learn that the heart more closely resembles an avian heart than that of a reptile. The museum also houses a collection of whale skeletons (very interesting stuff) as well as several exhibits that explain North Carolina natural history in detail.
The best part of the whole experience is that the museum is free (although if you're feeling nice you can throw a couple bucks in the donation cup). This museum is definitely one of the better educational places to go in Raleigh, and there are plenty of specialized exhibits for kids. You can't go wrong with taking the family here to enjoy an educational, fun and best of all cheap day.
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The whale bones are awesome! The acro-something-saurus is similarly awesome out in its round, glass-enclosed room with fake pterodactyls flying in circles above it. And it's free. Most of the rest of the permanent exhibits tend to focus pretty heavily on the wildlife and geography of North Carolina, as you would expect, and it's all really well done. I'd heard this place called the "Smithsonian of the South," and that's not too far from the truth.
PS: Go see the Dead Sea Scrolls while/if they're still there. It's worth the fee and they do a great job giving you plenty of background information on the location, discovery, preservation, and history of the scrolls before you actually get to them.
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Great exhibits, price is even better:) Plenty of fun stuff to do & see for the little ones, butterfly exhibit upstairs is really cool.
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Hooray for free entertainment! I took an elementary school fieldtrip to this museum and I remember being amazed by the ceiling-mounted whale skeleton. I still stop and stare at it even though I've been here several times now. I think this museum is great. It has several floors -- a crazy-cool bug exhibit, several NC-focused rooms, a dinosaur feature, lots of taxidermy, reptiles on display. Be on the look-out for their featured exhibits -- these will cost you, but only around $5 or so. The last one I saw was on new revelations in dinosaur archaeology. Really fascinating. The museum also occasionally plays host to conferences -- we came when the fossil conference was in town, and they had what must have been 100 tables set up with various fossil-hunters and their collections from across the nation. The museum also has a conference room and brings in speakers from time to time. Richard Louv came a few months ago and gave a presentation on kids and nature. This museum is an absolute gem of the city.
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This is a fantastic museum. It's fairly large, diverse in scope and best of all, free. Some exhibits require admission (there was one about noises animals make that failed to impress me) but for the most part a casual stroll filled with science and wonderment are on the house. They feature lots of little corpses and even some live organisms to tickle your fancy. It's centralized around the animals and plants of our fair state and I very much enjoyed my trip. The information density is fantastic; everywhere you look from ceiling to floor there are factoids and mini-exhibits (like hoof prints embedded in the ground or the ambient noises of local animals). It's a treat for the brain and if you haven't yet gone, FOR SHAME.
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This museum is only a few years old, and it is really sleek and nice inside. The exhibits are presented very nicely, and while the kids will have fun, there is plenty to interest adults, too. The main museum is free, though special exhibits usually charge an admission. We went to see the dinosaur exhibit that's there now. It was very interesting and had a high information content to go along with the fossils, casts, models, and videos. Definitely a nice way to spend a weekend afternoon!
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This is an excellent museum and should not be missed if visiting Raleigh, NC. There are plenty of things for all age groups - I hardly know where to begin... While I was there I visited to special dinosaur exhibit, the museum is free except for the special exhibits. The special exhibit had an excellent assortment of fossils and a great combination of informational and hands on interactive exhibits. The Docent was friendly and knowledgeable. The one thing I really like about this museum is it is very up to date. They discuss new theories or alternate theories through out the museum. Many of the things we thought we new as kids are quite different from the theories of today. I have visited several natural science museums in various parts of the country but this museum does something very unique. They have very imaginative ways of combining live animal (yes small live animals, turtles, snakes, insects, fish, etc) with static exhibits. They also integrate sounds through out the museum so the whole museum is a sensory experience. Do not miss the insect (Arthropod) exhibit on the fourth floor, some great insects to give mom and grandma the heebie jeebies. Be sure and visit the gift shop and look for a stair case to the left of the retail counter. The stair case leads to a small art exhibit from local artist up above the gift shop. I found something you definitely should not miss there, x-rays (yep that's right x-rays) of various types of flowers - absolutely stunning.
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