About Us

At the KU Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, we study the life of the planet for the benefit of the earth and its inhabitants.

We document the fantastic diversity of life on earth. We uncover its intricate patterns. We tell the grand stories that emerge from this research. And we educate graduate students — the next generation of biodiversity scientists.

The museum maintains research inventories of seven million plant and animal specimens representing life on earth, past and present. The inventories and their associated information are used for undergraduate, graduate, and public education; research; and public and professional service.

What's New

Education

Thousands of people participate in programs and outreach activities every year. Programs include gallery activities and hands-on science workshops for school groups, week-long themed public science events, and summer camps for young people.

School’s-out programs feature free science activities in the museum’s galleries during Lawrence public schools class breaks. Past events, such as Superhero Science and Survival Science, attracted nearly 2,000 visitors each week.

Most museum workshops include field trips and collecting expeditions.

Exhibits

About 50,000 people a year visit the museum’s exhibit galleries in Dyche Hall on KU's Lawrence campus.

The fossil exhibits, with extinct mammals, dinosaurs, reptiles, and fishes — the life of the past — are especially popular. The Panorama of North American plants and animals, the centerpiece exhibit, contains realistic scenes of animal and plant life from Alaska to Mexico. It’s the world’s largest diorama.

You’ll also find mammals, birds, and endangered habitats, along with live bees in a working hive, live snakes, and live fish in simulated Kansas stream habitats.

Exhibits

Science

The museum is the leading university natural history museum in the nation in biodiversity research — discovering, documenting, and disseminating knowledge of life on earth, past and present.

KU has the nation’s

Best bee and scorpionfly inventories.
Premier herbarium for Great Plains plant specimens.
Second-largest fossil plant inventories and largest inventory of fossil plants from Antarctica.
Fourth-largest inventory of reptiles and amphibians.
Fourth-largest university inventory of invertebrate fossils.
Fifth-largest mammal inventory.
Sixteenth-largest inventory of birds.
The fish inventory is among the nation's top 25.

For more information about our research inventories check out the library of life.

The KU museum also leads the nation in using information technology to harness biodiversity data from research inventories worldwide — the result of 300 years of the biological exploration of the planet. This vast storehouse of knowledge previously lay largely untapped. The results: better understanding of natural environments, enhanced power to predict environmental phenomena, and knowledge to inform natural resource management.

History

For both teaching and research uses, natural history inventories were started at KU before it opened in 1866. Within 20 years, they held 150,000 specimens of plants, mammals, birds, fishes, fossils, reptiles, and amphibians. Exhibits and education activities grew based on these research inventories. After World War II, collecting expanded beyond the Great Plains into the rest of the New World and beyond.

Today

Growth continues. The museum educates dozens of new scientists from around the world every year. Research funding and productivity are at all-time highs. And the museum leads the state in delivering informal science programs to the public.