On the eastern edge of City Park, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, one of the great natural history museums of the American West, sits with a view toward the mountains that makes its subject matter feel immediately present. The Denver Museum of Natural History, as it was originally called, was founded in 1900 and moved to this building in 1908. The wildlife dioramas created between the 1920s and 1940s remain among the finest examples of the habitat diorama tradition in American museums.
The dinosaur halls draw particular attention because Colorado and the surrounding states are among the most productive dinosaur fossil regions in the world: the Morrison Formation, a geological layer exposed in the foothills west of Denver, has yielded more different dinosaur species than almost any other comparable formation on earth. The museum also holds significant collections related to the Indigenous peoples of the Mountain West and high plains — collections that have been the subject of ongoing repatriation discussions with tribal nations — and a strong space science program driven by Colorado's substantial aerospace industry.