Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

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Blue Whale Skeleton

The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History is the oldest museum in Santa Barbara, California, founded in 1916. The museum is located in Mission Canyon, immediately behind the Santa Barbara Mission. Set in a traditional southern California environment, the museum campus occupies 12 acres (49,000 m²) of oak woodland along Mission Creek. It is housed in a mission-style, Spanish Mediterranean complex of buildings.

The museum is renowned for fine dioramas of birds, mammals, and southern California habitats, halls of marine life, geology, and Chumash Indian life, as well as an art gallery dedicated to antique natural history prints. It has collections of over 3 million specimens and an active research program with a focus on marine biology, terrestrial vertebrates, insects, anthropology, geological mapping, and natural history art.

Exhibits include "Toadally Frogs" and “Bringing the Condors Home” telling the story of the decline and beginning of recovery of the California Condor.

Ty Warner Sea Center

The museum’s Gladwin Planetarium was renovated in early 2005 and equipped with technology to display distant planets, stars, and galaxies.

The Ty Warner Sea Center, located on Santa Barbara’s historic Stearns Wharf, is an off-site facility owned and operated by the Museum of Natural History. It opened in April of 2005. Among the exhibits of the Sea Center are a Tide Pool with waves rushing into it every 60 seconds, the Wet Deck featuring direct access to the water below, the Channel Theater, the Workshop, the Whale Karaoke station, and the plastinated dolphin.