Founded in 1874, when San Diego counted barely 2,300 residents, this natural history museum has grown into the research institution you see today. The museum began as a small cabinet of natural curiosities assembled by local enthusiasts and has grown into a major research institution holding nearly eight million specimens documenting the natural history of the Baja California peninsula, Southern California, and the broader Pacific region. The current building, designed by William Templeton Johnson, opened in 1933 as part of the preparations for the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition.
Its neoclassical facade stands in deliberate contrast to the Spanish Colonial Revival architecture that dominates the rest of the park — a choice that provoked considerable debate at the time. Inside, exhibits cover the geology, paleontology, botany, and zoology of this corner of the world, including fossils recovered from local canyons, whale skeletons collected from Baja California lagoons, and an extensive collection documenting the desert ecosystems of the US-Mexico borderlands. The museum's research into regional biodiversity has become more urgent as climate change reshapes the landscapes it was built to document.