Page Updated: February 12, 2024

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Carcharocles Megalodon - Washington D.C.

Located on the National Mall directly across from the Smithsonian Institute Castle, the National Museum of Natural History maintains and preserves more than 145 million natural history specimens and human artifacts. According to its website, the museum is larger than eighteen football fields and is home to the largest natural history collection in the world.

There’s nothing about a Museum of Natural History that I don’t like. Lee’s chosen museum for our D.C. visit was the National Air and Space Museum, and of course we saw others. But the National Museum of Natural History has been a bucket list of mine since I was a kid. We arrived when the doors opened and were there until the doors shut. It was great!

We started at the Hope Diamond and spent the next hour in the galleries of the Gems & Minerals and Geology. There are 7,500 individual gemstones in Gems & Minerals and I did my best to look at every single one.

On the crossover between galleries stood a diorama and assorted interpretive signs of Bisbee’s Copper Queen Mine. Bisbee was one of the first places we stopped on our B&B journey, so it was exciting to see it represented in the National Museum of Natural History.

If we’ve seen a better display of bugs, I can’t remember where. The Live Insect Zoo and Live Butterfly Pavilion are neat additions to a museum. But Lee’s mind was blown with the horn on the Male Hercules Beetle appropriately placed in Objects of Wonder.

More rocks, more bugs, and definitely more bones. Between the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils and the Bones gallery on the first floor, the National Museum of Natural History has bones of all sorts covered.

We ate at both the Ocean Terrace Cafe, which had healthier options, and the Atrium Cafe with traditional American fare. Both were great options. Of all the museums we visited in D.C. in Feb 2023, the Museum of Natural History offered the best, well-rounded options with food that was actually good.