Since 1992, Fernbank Museum of Natural History has stood here in Druid Hills on Atlanta's east side, and you have reached the largest natural history museum in the Southeast. The museum's signature exhibit is its Great Hall, which displays full-scale mounted casts of some of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, including Argentinosaurus and Giganotosaurus — South American titanosaurs that were among the largest land animals that ever lived. The museum occupies a site adjacent to Fernbank Forest, a sixty-five-acre old-growth urban forest that has been preserved through more than a century of stewardship and represents one of the most significant examples of Piedmont forest ecology in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
Fernbank sits in Druid Hills, the neighborhood that Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and his firm planned in the 1890s and 1900s for real estate developer Joel Hurt — the same developer who created Inman Park. Druid Hills was designed as a picturesque residential suburb with curvilinear streets, deep wooded lots, and a parkway system that remains largely intact. It was the setting for the novel and film Driving Miss Daisy.
The combination of the Olmsted landscape, the old-growth forest, and the natural history museum makes this corner of Atlanta one of its most surprising and rewarding destinations. Walk in the forest if time allows.