A comprehensive and generally really interesting museum.
Plan to spend the whole day there and even then have to prioritise what you see.
The dinosaurs, life in the oceans, the tectonic plate/earthquakes, and mammals sections are real highlights. Most displays are both modern in their styling and comprehensible without being dumbed-down, the odd section like American Forests is old fashioned but mostly they are great.
Serval café options, the coffee in the cafeteria is actually quite nice unlike most museum coffee (and most coffee in the U.S. – I am Australian and used to much better quality coffee).
Expensive for a family, $100+ entry plus food is expensive. Plus some extra shows to pay for too.
We paid for a movie called ‘Beavers’ which was a half hour long but the actual core footage and material could have been covered in 5 minutes – the rest was just filler. On top of that, it was a poorly produced movie from the 1990s, which I though was poor form – there must be newer movies to run.
You have to get a timed entry – you have to book a date and time for entry, and pay for your entry up front, with no refunds.
I recommend you go on a day when you can book the 10am first entry – it gets really busy when all the school kids and the families with strollers arrive.
Also getting a timed entry doesn’t mean you just walk straight in – when we arrived at 10am the line to get into the museum was 100 metres long down the street. The bottleneck was security. Allow for 15 minutes or more in your planning.
All in all worth going to, with a few irritations.