Arizona Museum of Natural History
Main entrance of the Arizona Museum of Natural History
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| Established | 1977 |
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| Location | Mesa, Arizona, United States |
| Website | http://arizonamuseumofnaturalhistory.org/ |
The Arizona Museum of Natural History (originally the Mesa Southwest Museum) is the only natural history museum in the greater Phoenix area and is located in Mesa, Arizona. It exhibits the natural and cultural history of the Southwestern United States.
The Arizona Museum of Natural History was founded as a small museum in Mesa City Hall in 1977 with a small collection of Arizona artifacts, in a building designed by Lescher & Mahoney and built in 1937 with WPA funds, that originally housed Mesa City Hall, municipal courts, city library, police and fire departments. There were expansions to the building in 1983 and 1987, and in 2000 a new wing was added. The main museum complex is currently about 74,000 square feet (6,900 m2), of which about 46,000 square feet (4,300 m2) are dedicated to exhibitions containing a collection of about 60,000 objects of natural history, anthropology, history & art, with approximately 10,000 historic photographs. A research facility was also added in 1995. Additionally, the Arizona Museum of Natural History has prominent research curators in the fields of paleontology and archeology/anthropology. Recent annual attendance is about 139,998.
The Museum's exhibitions include a three-story indoor waterfall on Dinosaur Mountain, Dinosaur Hall, a real territorial jail, and a recreation of the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine. The Southwest Gallery consists of a native peoples’ gallery, with exhibits about Paleoindian big game hunters and gatherers, the first inhabitants of North America, and the Desert Cultures that developed later. It also holds a recreation of a Hohokam village, with pithouses and above-ground structures, outfitted with real artifacts as they might have been from about A.D. 600-1450. Another exhibit is the Ancient Cultures of Mexico. The Origins gallery is designed as a voyage through the timeline of the cosmos and discusses major events in the history of planet Earth.
Among the exhibitions is a hands-on Exploration Station and the Paleo Dig Pit.
Three changing exhibition galleries offer a variety of subjects. The evolution of flight—was it from the ground-up or from the tree down? AzMNH’s exhibition, "Rulers of the Prehistoric Skies," helped to answer that question. The exhibit has since been removed, but the pterosaurs are still visible throughout the museum.
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