World's Best Natural History Museums

From cabinets of curiosities to massive institutions, curios, oddities, and specimens offer visitors a connection to exotic, unknown worlds. Museum-goers travel through exhibits with the sense that only thing that separates them from the natural world is glass and time. Historically, natural history museums have worked to collect and to catalog hundreds of thousands of specimens to document biodiversity—artifacts that would, today, fall under the auspices of anthropology, geology, biology, botany, paleontology, and even astronomy. With exhibits ranging from dinosaurs to ancient humans, natural history museums inspire awe and curiosity in visitors of all ages. —Lydia Pyne, author of Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Fossil Humans