Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

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The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California, USA 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 collections in the following fields:

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.

The museum's collections are strong in many fields, but the mineralogy and Pleistocene paleontology are the most esteemed, the latter thanks to wealth of specimens collected from the famed La Brea Tar Pits over the years.

Over the years, the museum has added to its original building rather than replaced it. The old domed rotunda still features a bronze representation of three Muses holding up the world, representing the three subject areas to which the museum was dedicated in 1913. This hall is among the most distinctive locales in Los Angeles and has often been used as a filming location.