The Museum specializes in natural science exhibitions, education, and research and collections in astronomy, geology, herpetology, ichthyology, invertebrate zoology, mammalogy, ornithology, and paleontology. We have traveling exhibits (currently “The World’s Largest Dinosaurs”), workshops, classes and trips, special events, 3D movies, educational programs, science talks, lectures, member tours, summer camps, birthday parties, dining, and shopping for science and nature-related gifts and art. We show B-movies on First Fridays. We rent areas of the Museum for private events and meetings, including weddings and wedding receptions. We also have an outdoor field station, Prairie Ridge, in west Raleigh, open for hiking, wildlife watching, and nature programs, which includes a Nature Play Space for young children. We have a satellite branch under development in Whiteville, NC.Established in 1879.In 1879, the merger of the state’s agricultural and geological collections planted the seed for what would eventually become the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. A pair of English immigrants, Herbert Hutchinson Brimley and Clement Samuel Brimley, grew up in the collecting tradition of middle-class England. The brothers served North Carolina in separate capacities for nearly 60 years. H.H. was a hunter-naturalist who pioneered interpretive exhibitions and educational programs; C.S. was a scientist-collector who painstakingly built the zoological collections that informed his brother’s public offerings. Their careers laid two paths the Museum would follow into the present day. Throughout, the words of H.H. lighted the way: “The building of a museum is a never-ending work. A finished museum is a dead museum….” A new building opened in 2000 that made the Museum the largest of its kind in the Southeast. In 2012, the Nature Research Center added another 80,000 square ft. to the Museum.