Exposition Park & Natural History Museum

Exposition Park is LA's museum campus — a 160-acre park south of downtown that houses the Natural History Museum (the largest natural and cultural history museum in the western US), the California Science Center (home to the Space Shuttle Endeavour), the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (opening soon, designed by MAD Architects), and the LA Memorial Coliseum, which hosted the Olympics in 1932 and 1984 and will again in 2028.

The Natural History Museum, founded in 1913, contains over 35 million specimens spanning 4.5 billion years — from meteorites and dinosaur skeletons to a gem vault with one of the finest mineral collections in the world. The Dinosaur Hall features the museum's T. rex growth series — three T. rex specimens at different life stages displayed together, the only such series in the world. The Nature Gardens, a 3.5-acre outdoor space that recreates Southern California's native ecosystems, provides living habitat for local wildlife and a contrast to the museum's preserved specimens.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour, displayed vertically in the California Science Center's Samuel Oschin Pavilion, is one of the most impressive artifacts in any museum — a spacecraft that flew 25 missions and 123 million miles, displayed so close you can see the heat-shield tiles scarred by re-entry. The shuttle's journey through LA streets from LAX to the museum in 2012 — requiring the removal of trees and power lines along a 12-mile route — was one of the most extraordinary logistical operations in the city's history.