University of Michigan Museum of Natural History
museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan
The University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH, formerly known as the Exhibit Museum and Exhibit Museum of Natural History) is a natural history museum of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. The university's natural history collections date to 1837, and have been on display since 1881. The current museum was founded in 1956, and is operated by the university's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
The university's natural history collection was housed in the Alexander G. Ruthven Museums Building from 1928 to 2017, when preparations began to move the museum to the new Biological Sciences Building on the university's Central Campus. The museum has over 45,000 square feet of exhibit space, and offers free admission to the general public.
History
The university's natural history collections began in 1837, and the first formal museum for their exhibit was established in 1881. In 1925, the state legislature appropriated $900,000 (equivalent to $12,800,000 in 2024) for the construction of a new museum building, which would house researchers' offices and public exhibits. The new University Museums Building was completed in 1928, and housed museums of anthropology, paleontology and zoology, and a herbarium. The first public exhibits in the new building opened in the winter of 1929.
The University Museums Building was built with two pedestals at its main entrance for sculptures, but none were installed at the time of its construction.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “University of Michigan Museum of Natural History” is museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through University, Michigan and Museum, not as a finished interpretation.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7895767. VIAF identifies the subject as 263076924. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1837, 1881, 1956 and 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “University of Michigan Museum of Natural History” 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.