The Museum of Science features more than 700 permanent exhibits with numerous opportunities for hands-on, experiential learning about natural history, nanotechnology, engineering and energy.
If visitors crave an electrifying indoor lightning display, they can visit the museum's "Theater of Electricity," and encounter the world's largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generator, which hurls crackling bolts capable of sparking anyone's curiosity about storms and safety.
2. American Museum of Natural History (New York City)
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| Credit: ©AMNH |
New York's iconic American Museum of Natural History has a lot to offer — spectacular fossils, rare minerals, anthropology collections representing cultures worldwide, and hall after hall of dioramas that act as windows into the lives of animals around the world.
Fans of the popular "Night at the Museum" movies can search for some of the famous exhibits that come to life in the film, such as the T. rex, located in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, and Neanderthals in the Hall of Human Origins. Visitors can even pose for a selfie with a seated statue of Theodore Roosevelt in the Roosevelt Rotunda.
3. National Museum of Natural History (Washington, D.C.)
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| Credit: Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution |
At the National Museum of Natural History, 124 million objects await you, including the Hope Diamond — the largest blue diamond in the world — a living coral reef and a collection of mummies. Permanent exhibitions cover earth sciences, dinosaur fossils, human diversity, and animals and their ecosystems, to name a few.
Inside FossiLab — a real fossil laboratory in one of the museum's public spaces — visitors can watch paleontologists as they unpack, clean, conserve and document new fossil arrivals and samples from the museum's extensive collection
4. Fernbank Museum of Natural History (Atlanta)
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| Credit: Daniel Mayer / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons |
With every step you take at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History, you're walking on fossils. The museum's floors, made up of 40,000 limestone tiles, hold the fossil remains of animals that lived more than 150 million years ago, in a shallow reef.
Fernbank is home to fossils representing some of the world's largest dinosaurs, and hosts Atlanta's biggest IMAX screen. Their collections and displays offer an introduction to Georgia's natural history as well as an overview of cultures, traditions and artifacts from around the world
5. The Field Museum (Chicago)
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| Credit: Greg Neise © The Field Museum |
Does the prospect of visiting the largest T. rex ever found appeal to you? How about exploring an Egyptian tomb, or witnessing DNA research? If that sounds exciting, a visit to The Field Museum is well worth your time, with exhibits that inspire an appreciation for nature and human culture.
Visitors can even experience a bug-size view of the world in the "Underground Adventure" exhibit, an immersive environment that offers an entirely new perspective on tiny creatures and how they live underground.
6. La Brea Tar Pits and Museum (Los Angeles)
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| Credit: La Brea Tar Pits and Museum |
It's not every day that you can visit a museum that's also a dig site, where down-and-dirty paleontology is taking place on its very grounds. Mammal fossils on display at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum emerged from — where else? — tar pits, which are just a short walk from the main museum building. Some of the tar pits are in the process of being excavated, with paleontologists working to extract the remains of ancient animals and plants buried there.
Inside the museum, more than 1 million ice-age fossils from the tar pits are on display, including mammoths, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves. At the center is the Fishbowl Lab, a large room surrounded by glass where visitors can watch preparators as they clean and assemble fossils, from the miniscule to the massive
7. California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco)
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| Credit: TheDailyNathan / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons |
The California Academy of Sciences promises "a daily dose of wonder," and is the only location on the planet where you can find a natural history museum, a planetarium and an aquarium under the same roof.
As if that weren't enough, there's also a four-story rainforest, an educational play space for toddlers, and a Project Lab — a window into the research that takes place every day, involving 60 scientists and hundreds of researchers.
There are plenty of opportunities for hands-on experiences, such as touching sea creatures in the Discovery Tidepool, and handling pelts, shells and other specimens in the Naturalist Center. Stop by the current exhibit, "Color of Life," to bask in the rainbow of hues found in a variety of plants and animals. Using interactive displays, visitors can see these colors as animals do, and learn to interpret their signals of camouflage, warning and allure
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