New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science
science museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science is a natural history and science museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico near Old Town Albuquerque. The Museum was founded in 1986. It operates as a public revenue facility of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
History
The museum was created by an act of the New Mexico Legislature signed into law by Governor Bruce King in March 1980. Part of the motivation for the project was to provide a home for some of the numerous dinosaur fossils discovered in New Mexico rather than sending them to out-of-state institutions. Ground was broken on a 4.8-acre (1.9 ha) site near Old Town and the museum opened on January 11, 1986. It was one of the first new natural history museums in the U.S. in decades and represented an updated approach focusing on interactive multimedia exhibits rather than large collections of specimens displayed in glass cases. An astronomy center including an observatory and planetarium was added to the museum in 1999. This was originally a separate museum operated by the University of New Mexico, but was merged into the Museum of Natural History and Science in 2007.
Permanent exhibits
Time Tracks, the Museum's permanent exhibit halls illustrate a journey through time, covering the birth of the Universe (≈13.6 billion years ago) to the Ice Age (≈10,000 years ago).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science” as science museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as science museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3329691. VIAF identifies the subject as 128284023. The Library of Congress control number is nr94009574. Authority coordinates are 35.098, -106.665. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1980, 1999 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.