The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles

On our recent family holiday to Los Angeles, we spent a great morning at the Natural History Museum. We began our visit with a showing at the 3D Theater - Oceans 3D: Our Blue Planet. Narrated by Kate Winslet, this 3D oceanic adventure explores stories of under the sea creatures and it was truly fascinating and beautiful. 

Then we explored the rest of the museum. We began with the mammal halls - African Mammals and North American Mammals. Each massive hall contains dozens of dioramas that recreate the natural environments of these creatures over a range of habitats. You can study the animals in detail close up, and I wasn't surprised to find out that these habitat dioramas are amongst the finest in the world - I've certainly not seen anything as magnificent in other museums that we have visited.

Like many children, both of mine are fascinated by dinosaurs, so we spent most of our time in the Dinosaur Hall. The center piece is a growth series display featuring a baby, juvenile and sub-adult Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is the only one of its kind in the world and includes the youngest known T-Rex fossil in the world. There is also a Triceratops, and my favourite dinosaur, a Stegosaurus.

We all spent a lot of time playing with this interactive digital table where you could take part in a fossil dig and act as different characters digging for bones and wrapping fossils - a really fun way to learn about how a fossil dig runs.

In the Age of Mammals exhibit we admired this mastodon, a species which once lived in this area alongside the giant jaguar and sabre-toothed cat. Both children have studied the Stone Age recently at school, and this exhibit was the perfect accompaniment to their learning.

We also enjoyed a visit to the Spider Pavilion which is a temporary exhibition available until the 25th November, 2018. You can walk through inside a safe pavilion and observe spiders up close in their webs without any barriers - not one for the arachnophobics! I was a bit nervous but luckily the spiders don't move, and are large enough that you can keep a close eye on them!

We finished our day spending some time in the Discovery Center. This area is fully aimed at children and there are plenty of hands on exhibits to entertain them, for example reassembling skeletons and  touching items like minerals, furs and fossils. The favourite area was the dinosaur dig pit, I think that the children would have spent hours here if we'd had time!

I also made a little video of our day which you can see below:

We really enjoyed our visit to the Natural History Musuem, and I'd definitely recommend a visit if you are in the area. It's also ideally located to combine a visit with the California Science Center which is on the same site.

We were provided with complimentary entry to the museum in exchange for sharing our visit on my blog and social media.