The University of Nebraska State Museum, housed in Morrill Hall on the city campus, is the state's natural history museum and one of the best in the region. The paleontology collections are the draw — Nebraska's Miocene and Pliocene fossil beds have produced some of the finest specimens anywhere, and the museum displays them well. The Elephant Hall on the main floor is extraordinary: full-scale mounted skeletons of mammoths, mastodons, and extinct relatives arranged in a tableau that gives a vivid sense of the Pleistocene Great Plains.
Beyond the fossils, the museum covers Nebraska's geology, botany, anthropology, and zoology in solid if conventional fashion. The real treasure is the basement research collections, not generally open to the public, which hold millions of specimens that make UNL a serious research institution. For visitors, an hour in the public galleries is rewarding; the planetarium in the building adds another option for a longer visit.