N.C. Museum of Natural Science

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences fills a 300,000-square-foot campus on West Jones Street in downtown Raleigh. Exhibits run across the whole of natural history, and the museum also keeps research collections and working scientists on site.

Its Nature Research Center holds three floors of laboratories and exhibitions where visitors can watch museum researchers study the natural world in real time. Beyond the exhibits, the museum puts on live science shows, classes, field trips, and Science Cafes, and BugFest is the event it is best known for.

What to know

• Dueling Dinosaurs is a permanent exhibition built around a tyrannosaur and a Triceratops found locked together.
• Those fossils are the most complete examples of either dinosaur ever found.
• The exhibition includes a working laboratory alongside the fossils.
• The downtown campus is joined by the Prairie Ridge Ecostation and a satellite site in Whiteville.
• Classes run for students from pre-kindergarten through graduate school, held indoors, outdoors, and online.