Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in Exposition Park in 1913 as the Museum of History, Science, and Art. The moving force behind it was a museum association founded in 1910. The distinctive building with fitted marble walls and domed and colonnaded rotunda, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Additional wings opened in 1925, 1930, 1960, and 1976. The museum was divided administratively in 1961 into the Los Angeles County Museum of History and Science and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The latter moved to new quarters on Wilshire Boulevard in 1965. In 1965, the Museum of History and Science became the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Over the last decades, the museum renamed itself the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for marketing purposes.

As the largest museum in the Western United States, the museum's collections include nearly 33 million specimens and artifacts and cover 4.5 billion years of history. The museum maintains research and collection in the fields of archaeology, ethnology, botany, crustacea, echinoderms, entomology, herpetology, history, ichthyology, invertebrate paleontology, malacology, mammalogy, mineralogy, ornithology, annelida, and vertebrate paleontology. The museum has three floors of permanent exhibits. Among the most popular museum displays are those devoted to animal habitats, dinosaurs, pre-Colombian cultures, and the Ralph M. Parsons Discovery Center and Insect Zoo.

The museum has two satellites, The George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries and the William S. Hart County Park.