beneski museum

Amherst College’s Beneski Museum of Natural History is one of New England’s largest natural history museums, featuring three floors of exhibits with more than 1,700 specimens on display and 200,000 pieces in the greater collections and presents a history of scholarship at Amherst College. The collections generally date from the 19th and early 20th century. The materials were carefully studied at or soon after the time of collection and is well documented in the scientific literature of the past. For this reason, Beneski’s collections are particularly valuable to researchers who are exploring the connections between new discoveries and existing dogma.

Step inside the museum and you’ll find: Dramatic displays of fossil skeletons, from fish to dinosaurs to Ice Age megafauna; an extraordinary collection of dinosaur footprints, geological specimens and immersive exhibits that tell the history of the local landscape through geologic time, and mineral specimens from around the world and meteorites from beyond Earth.

Beneski’s galleries are open to the public 6 days/week, 52 weeks/year. Exhibits highlight the geological history of the Amherst region using specimens collected by Amherst faculty and students.