National Museum of Natural History

The National Museum of Natural History anchors the north side of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the most-visited of the Smithsonian's museums with about 3.9 million visitors in 2024. Free to enter, it holds more than 145 million specimens and artifacts — the Hope Diamond, a towering African elephant in the rotunda, dinosaur skeletons, and a vast hall of fossils and gems.

Opened in 1910, the domed Beaux-Arts building is one of a cluster of Smithsonian institutions lining the Mall. Its collections underpin research in biology, anthropology, and the earth sciences alongside its public galleries.

• Washington, D.C.
  The federal capital district of the United States related