Utah Museum of
Natural History
The Utah Museum of Natural History (UMNH) is
situated on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake
City, Utah, showcasing displays of natural history subjects, and
mostly about the state's natural history. The museum was started
in 1959, when the university's faculty committee decided to
consolidate all their natural history collections that was
located around its campus, and was established by the
legislature in 1963, opening in the former George Thomas library
and would include specimens from the Deseret Museum and the
Charles Nettleton Strevell museum that had been situated in the
old Lafayette school from 1939 until 1947. This museum contains
more than 1.2 million objects in its outstanding collections
that are used for education and research purposes, and emphasize
the natural history of the state and is accessible to
researchers from across the globe, with the majority coming from
the public lands that lie within the inter-mountain region of
the country. Their collections are being used for studies in
biological, cultural and geological diversity and the history of
living systems and human cultures in the state's area. Their
anthropology collection is further divided into the
archaeological collections with 750,000 specimens, ethnographic
collections that have over 2000 specimens and associated records
from over 3800 sites; the biology collection that includes;
30,000 specimens of mammals, 123,000 plant specimens in the
Garrett Herbarium with many having viable seeds and spores,
20,000 birds, 180,000 insects, 18,000 lower vertebrates and
22,000 mollusks. The geology collection contains 3600 minerals,
20,000 vertebrate fossils that includes the famous
Cleveland-Lloyd Jurassic dinosaur collections, Cedar Mountain
Formation localities, late cretaceous vertebrates from the Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument and significant lower
cretaceous dinosaurs from the museum's Long Walk Quarry. Their
exhibits occupy some 23,000 square feet of space on the first
and second floors with three broad areas of natural sciences
that include; biology, anthropology and geology/paleontology.
These are located in the Cooper Hall of Anthropology,
Geology/Paleontology Hall, Life Science Hall, Norton Hall of
Minerals, Dumke Gallery and the Quinney Dinosaur Discovery Hall.
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