Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

Address:2559 Puesta Del Sol Rd.
Santa Barbara, California
Tel: (805) 682-4711

Inspiring a passion of respect and knowledge for the natural world, The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History is loaded with exhibits, all set in a serene 11 acre historic canyon crossed year round by Mission Creek. A cluster of Spanish-style buildings and bright nature walks keep visitors entertained for hours.

The museum's 11 exhibit halls focus on regional natural history, birds, insects, mammals, marine life, paleontology, reptiles amphibians, Native Americans and Chumash Indians. Featured items include a life-size blue whale skeleton, a planetarium, and an antique art gallery. The museum's Anthropology Department houses an archaeological collection of some 75,000 objects from the Santa Barbara coast and islands representing 10,000 years of cultural development in the region. The ethnographic collection holds rare Chumash basketry and fiber works. Also on display are more than 5,000 ethnographic artifacts representing over 500 native cultures of California, the Southwest, the Northwest Coast, the Great Plains and the Western Arctic.

Visitors will love the museum's Department of Invertebrate Zoology, which houses over 2 million specimens and 400 species, including collections of Mollusk, Coleoptera, Cnidaria, Dicyemida and Bryozoa. But the vertebrates are not to be outdone. The Avian Skin Collection includes as many as 6,900 specimens and 490 species of birds. The Avian Egg Collection contains over 11,000 egg sets from 1300 species worldwide. There are over 7,000 specimens from 135 species of mammals and the museum's collection includes one of the best regional synoptic collections of terrestrial and marine vertebrate skeletons on the west coast.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Ty Warner Sea Center is an engaging marine education facility, designed especially for children. Interactive exhibits encourage visitors to take ocean samples, view sea life through video magnifiers, crawl through a tunnel inside a 1,500 gallon surge tank to see marine life, and sing along with whales and seals.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History also features stimulating temporary exhibitions through a blend of media techniques.

Be sure to check out the museum's store with items such as pine needle basket kits, music, books, and other fine gifts.

Begin your nature filled day from the north by taking US Hwy. 101 south to the Mission St. exit and turn left towards the hills at the stop light. Proceed on Mission to Santa Barbara St. and head left making a right on Los Olivos. Stay left at the "Y" and cross the stone bridge. Make a second left after the bridge (Las Encinas) and another left at the stop sign at Puesta del Sol Rd. The first parking lot driveway will take you into the museum.

The earliest roots of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History extend back to the 1890s when a group of professional scientists and amateurs founded the Santa Barbara Natural History Society with a small museum at 1226 State Street. This pioneer effort waned around the turn of the century but was reinforced in 1916 with the arrival of noted ornithologist William Leon Dawson from Ohio. Together with a group of prominent Santa Barbarans, Dawson founded the Museum of Comparative Oology, at first located in two outbuildings on his property on Puesta del Sol in Mission Canyon and based on his own extensive collection of bird eggs as well as collections of several members of the community. Dawson and his friends believed that oology—the study of bird eggs—"would throw a flood of light upon the trend of life itself," yielding "the secrets of life's origins and its destiny."