Utah museums by the numbers

More than 250 bird species use the refuge, and 67 of them nest there.

The zoo started out in Liberty Park.

It moved to its current Gateway building and took the Discovery Gateway name on 16 September 2006.

You can see the speed-demon SR-71 and the one-and-only F-117 Stealth Fighter.

The planetarium before it, the Hansen, opened back in 1965.

The cars run from a 1901 single cylinder Oldsmobile to a 1930 16 cylinder Cadillac.

It holds one of the largest dinosaur collections in the world.

You can walk through a life-sized, six-room replica of an ancient home.

The park covers nearly 23,000 acres.

The dome was covered in Utah copper.

It is the oldest Anglo-built house in Utah still on its original foundation.

The blacksmith shop and corral were built from railroad ties that floated down the river from Wyoming in high water.

The historical society put out its own town history book in 1979, covering 1851 to 1979.

The museum shows the tool chest of Alexander Fortie, an architect and builder of the Wasatch Stake Tabernacle.

It is the only museum in the country that shows a state-owned collection of contemporary folk art.

In 1961 the whole University of Utah campus landscape was named the State Arboretum.

The museum shows the original Golden Spike safe.

The first Tooele County Junior Livestock Show was held here in 1947.

The visitor center shows an award-winning 24-minute film called A Song of Seasons.

The farmhouse walls were built with adobe bricks recycled from the family's older house.

Nearby, the Robert F. Aldous Cabin is the first cabin built in Huntsville, in 1861.

The collection holds over 12,000 items, from artworks to natural history specimens and oral histories.

Kids can ride a pony matched to them.

A tree inside soars 30 feet up, with stairs to the second floor.

Of all the army's buildings, only the Commissary Building and the cemetery are left today.

The center teaches how to 'Visit with Respect' so the landscape and its cultural sites stay protected.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid out in this area.

Most of the garden's models were made by sculptor Elbert Porter and bought in 1977.

In 1916 the zoo bought an elephant named Princess Alice from a traveling circus, and her calf was the first elephant born in Utah.

The museum started out at the old Miller Motorsports Park in Tooele.

The preserve covers 1,200 acres at the entrance to Park City.

The first school, built in 1863, was made of adobe.

Scenes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Robert Redford and Paul Newman, were filmed here in 1969.

The building was a school for 30 years and then Grantsville's city hall.

In 1919 the cabin rode on a parade float.

The park land was once an artillery firing range for Fort Douglas.

The wall shows over 1,500 dinosaur bones about 150 million years old.

Its first director, Tony Rasmussen, was a Coast Guard veteran, artist and polio survivor.

The museum names new members to a Utah Cowboy Hall of Fame each year.

The Needles is named for its colorful spires of Cedar Mesa Sandstone.

Paleontologist Earl Douglass found the bone beds in 1909 while collecting for the Carnegie Museum.

The Japanese garden was the second section ever planted.

Besides worship it hosted school, dances and plays, with an amusement hall in the basement.

One oddity on display is the 'Dancing Calves,' born just north of Cedar City.

The village here was likely lived in from A.D. 1050 to 1200.

Washington was settled in 1857 by southern converts Brigham Young sent on a 'Cotton Mission' to grow cotton.

Building the courthouse took six years, from 1876 to 1882.

Planting was put on hold by World War II and picked back up in 1947.

The museum shows horse-drawn vehicles used from 1850 to 1920.

Swiss settlers known as the Swiss Company arrived in Santa Clara on November 28, 1861.

Gardens from 28 nations grow side by side here.

You walk past over 100 life-size dinosaurs, each shown with the track it left.

The art center opened in the old Eccles mansion in October 1959.

It is the oldest museum for the visual fine arts in Utah.

You can see a chair Brigham Young built as a carpenter before he joined the Church.

The museum is in the town's old school; a gym was added out back in 1922.

At its peak, Topaz held 8,100 people.

By the 1930s the collections were kept in one room of the Education Building, which is now the Provo City Library.

Brigham Young dedicated the building in 1863.

The island's bison herd started with 12 bison brought over in 1893.

It was one of the largest communities west of the Colorado River.

J. Reuben Clark grew up a Grantsville farm boy and went on to serve in the administrations of seven U.S. Presidents.

One exhibit traced how Cosmo the Cougar's costumes changed over time.

The school's principal drew elaborate colored chalk pictures on the walls, and some of them are still preserved.

It is noted as the world's largest collection of artifacts on one particular subject.

Martina Sorensen, who lived here until 1954, was the last remaining pioneer of Draper.

More than 60% of the water the district delivers goes onto outdoor landscaping.

The fort is built of volcanic rock.

In 1928 rangers gave reptile programs with a live cage of rattlesnakes and gopher snakes.

The Utah Women Artists Exhibition shown here first started out in a traveling van.

He spent winters in St. George from 1870 to 1877.

You can see an authentic Mormon handcart.

It started in the 1960s with one professor's personal collection of artifacts.

Co-founder Stephen Czerkas made groundbreaking reconstructions of Stegosaurus and Diplodocus, which had been reconstructed wrong until then.

The Rock Chapel was built in Coalville in 1853 and has been a fort, a courthouse, a schoolhouse and a church.

The featured dinosaurs roamed the Moab area, where their tracks are found in abundance.

The fleet includes a Soviet MiG-15, a swept-wing jet fighter that first saw service in 1949.

Its print collection includes works by Marc Chagall and James McNeill Whistler.

The museum began in the mid-1950s when local historian John Hutchings donated his big collection to the town.

Staff make their own original star shows and bought a 128 CPU render cluster to do it.

The museum started out inside the Ogden City Mall.

The building was the park's visitor center before it became the museum.

Settlers from all over southern Utah worked on it or sent goods for its construction.

When the museum moved, its dinosaur skeletons were remounted in correct poses.

Legend says the point was named because cowboys used it as a natural corral, where horses often died of exposure.

The men spent 6 weeks blasting and chiseling a path down a 1,200 foot drop in the cliffs.

Over 5,500 bones from more than ten dinosaur species have been dug up here.

Its current home, the Rio Tinto Center, opened in November 2011.

White-faced ibis nest here in colonies of up to 10,000 birds.

A 12-mile Auto Tour Route lets you watch birds without leaving your car.

It is one of the oldest and perhaps best preserved schoolhouses in Utah.

Before it was a museum, the building was South Jordan's library.

The museum turned a C-130 fuselage into a classroom in 2019.

The museum's building served as the media center during the 2002 Winter Games.

Architectural Digest named its building, inspired by the region's slot canyons, the best-designed museum in Utah.

Another honoree, John Albert Scorup, ran one of the largest cattle operations in the nation.

The settlers' trip covered 260 miles over 6 months in winter.

The park holds more than 2,000 natural sandstone arches.

The zoo houses over 800 animals from 139 species.

You walk in under timbers from the old Lucin Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake.

The mine runs around the clock, every day of the year.

Themed gardens range from rose and oriental to edible and pollinator gardens.

The collection includes Victorian hair art, made into wall wreaths and jewelry.

Toyota's Land Speed Cruiser here set a record of 230.02 mph.

Some of the cars still drive in the Pioneer Day Parade every July 24.

The gardens include a replica of the garden from the book The Secret Garden.

Round Valley was one of Scipio's early names, along with Graball.

The house itself was built more than 150 years ago from adobe bricks.

With 60 complete dinosaur skeletons, it has one of the world's largest displays of mounted dinosaurs.

The Smouts moved the cabin with them to Slaterville in April 1858.

Kanab was home to the classic TV series The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke.

Its outdoor Discovery Garden has two hedge mazes and a replica of Timpanogos Cave.

The collection started in 1971 with a single 1930 Packard.

The collection includes work by LeConte Stewart.

It has been housed in Lehi's historic Memorial Building since the mid-1990s.

In 1882 the family built a bigger house right around the small cabin.

The land was a wartime Army depot from 1941 to 1973.

About 250 men, women and children in seventy families made the trek.

It was built by William Stokes, a Union Army veteran who had been the U.S. marshal of Beaver.

The museum is in Salina's Old Presbyterian Rock Church.

Its demonstration Utah House has straw-bale walls and recycles rain runoff.

The white barn on the Swaner Farm was built in 1933 by the Fletcher family.

The garden started out in Farmington before moving to Kaysville.

The Stagecoach Inn was the first stop south of Salt Lake City on the Overland Stage Route and also a Pony Express stop.

Kiefer Sutherland borrowed the museum's windmill for a movie.

The Utah Wing formed in the mid-1980s, and its first airplane was a Boeing N2S Stearman.

One theater has a 220-degree view that puts you in a grove of trees in upstate New York.

A 2004 survey ranked it first in attendance among university campus art museums.

It started when banker Russell Lord Tracy gave his private bird collection to the city's children.

Its displays focus on 'traces in time,' the geology and archaeology of the Monument.

The Loveless Home, built around 1853 and lived in until 2013, is the longest-inhabited building in Provo.

Eli has been collecting horse-drawn wagons and buggies for about fifty years.

The first class of 18 Hall of Famers was inducted in 1970.

It was one of the Department of the Interior's first buildings rated Gold LEED for green design.

The Carriage Hall has a Peter Schuttler wagon that could haul three tons.

Students run the planetarium.

Since 2005, fourteen new dinosaur species have been named from the Monument, plus one from state land just north of Big Water.

The site includes the Hansen House, two pioneer cabins, a workshop and the Jensen Granary, all in Ephraim Pioneer Park.

The first ranger station sat empty for ten years because there was no water at its location.

The museum has one of the largest Indian artifact collections in Utah, with more arrowheads than you would believe.

The relic hall was first built as an office and tithing office for the local church stake president.

As Farm Country, it was the very first part of Thanksgiving Point to open to the public.

He likely wrote some of his famous sermons in the farmhouse basement office.

You can climb down a ladder into a 1,000-year-old kiva.

Its famous moon rock has been on loan from NASA since 1975.

The house's red brick was shipped in from the Midwest.

The three caves are linked by tunnels blasted in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration.

A group of Utah paleontologists brought the idea for a world-class dinosaur museum to Thanksgiving Point.

The museum holds more than 1 million artifacts from all over the world.

Built of local rock, the church took 13 years to finish.

The museum shows dinosaur eggs from around the world and sculptures of baby Protoceratops and Maiasaura.

The museum moved to its Main Street home in Vernal in 2014.

The museum has over 300 taxidermy animals from all over the world.

The Commemorative Air Force was started in Texas in 1961 to save one of each kind of airplane flown in World War II.

The most famous sculpture is a Sphinx with Joseph Smith's head.

Paleontologists think more than 100,000 bones may still be waiting to be found.

The building sits on 99 base isolators to protect it from earthquakes on the Wasatch Fault.

Visitors vote for their favorite jeep in the collection.

Clark liked school so much he repeated the 8th grade three times, because it was the highest grade offered.

The Goodyear cabin is the oldest building in Utah not built by Native Americans.

It is the only identified visionary art environment in Utah.

Harry Goulding sent photos of Monument Valley to director John Ford, who ended up filming Stagecoach there.

It housed Parowan High School for the 1917-1918 school year.

Before it was an arts center, the old chapel was the Hollywood Stuntmen's Hall of Fame.

By 1870 eleven children were living in this one log cabin.

Kids get Seek and Find activity sheets to hunt through the displays.

The stone Indian Tower was built as a private fort for one family, the only tower like it known in Utah.

For a while it was a women's dormitory for Weber State College.

The collection includes works by Rembrandt, Norman Rockwell and Minerva Teichert.

It is Utah's oldest existing government building.

Silver was found here in sandstone, which geologists first refused to believe because silver is not usually found in that rock.

The copper made here is refined to 99.99% pure.

Two local women, Donna Bott and Florence Lamb, turned the old school into a museum, dedicated in 1990.

The collection spans 5,000 years of human creativity.

The relic hall is the old Alpine church meetinghouse, built from 1857 to 1863.

The museum first opened in 1987 inside a World War II warehouse.

The park warns that GPS may send you the wrong way, so bring a map.

It holds more than 100 jeeps, from 1941 to today.

It shows original gun prototypes John M. Browning designed right in Ogden.

It holds one of the largest fluorescent mineral displays in the United States.

The largest known Fremont village was uncovered while Interstate 70 was being built, and the museum keeps objects from it.

The conservatory is a federally regulated containment facility, so no butterfly is allowed to leave with you.

You can see a covered wagon and a buggy from the pioneer era.

It sits on base isolators so it can ride out as much as a 7.3 magnitude earthquake.

Gale was the nickname early settlers gave South Jordan in 1859.

It shows one of the largest collections of Ancestral Pueblo pottery in the Four Corners.

Kids can climb into a real Life Flight helicopter.

The center keeps typed histories, obituaries and even birthday records for residents 80 and over.

The rock layer holding the bones is tilted steeply, at 67 degrees.

It is built of sawn cottonwood logs.

It has fifteen permanent exhibits running from Native Utah to the present day.

It holds the wagon Brigham Young rode into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847.

The finds include pottery, baskets and arrowheads.

The farm sat on the 1913 route of the Lincoln Highway.

Browning's BAR rifle was a mainstay of the US Army for 80 years.

The collections have been on the SUU campus since as early as 1915.

The atrium's domed window is made of 14,000 pieces of colored glass.

Among the pioneer items is an old telephone operator switchboard.

The stone house served as headquarters for Hamblin's mission among the American Indians of the region.

Thousands of artifacts dug from the ancient village are on permanent display.

The building was put up by the Relief Society women, taken over by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers in 1906, and used as a school in 1916.

Since 1992 it has been in the south turret of Old Main.

The museum holds the printing press that printed the first edition of the Book of Mormon in 1830.

The old City Hall building once held the Territorial Jail.

One flagship piece is the Mormon Meteor III race car.

It has the first Land Cruiser sold in the United States.

You can weigh your group on the station's original baggage scale.

The cave served as a speakeasy in the 1920s during Prohibition.

For years most of the collection was stored under LaVell Edwards Stadium.

A few older sculptures still stand as a reminder of how much our picture of dinosaurs has changed.

A 1940-50 Howdy Doody puppet set is in the show cases.

The farm was first owned by James McBride, the founder of Grantsville.

The Grand Lobby ceiling rises 56 feet.

After buying the house, Brigham Young remodeled it and doubled its size.

The organ from Vernal's Vogue Theatre is on display.

The Hutchings family gave the whole permanent collection to "the children of Lehi."

It was a stop for travelers, the Pony Express and telegraph lines from 1867 to the early 1880s.

The museum covers more than three acres on the old Tooele Valley Railroad site.

The museum is in the basement of the county courthouse.

It displays the Huntington Mammoth, one of the best-kept fossil elephants anywhere.

The museum complex includes an old barbershop and the historic Wilcox Cabin.

The park hosted the 2002 Olympic Winter Games events at Soldier Hollow.

The Island in the Sky mesa sits on sandstone cliffs over 1,000 feet above the land around it.

The park warns that GPS units often lead people astray here, so bring a map.

The museum shares its home with the town's old jail.

A 3D display shows how Tooele was laid out in plots.

The museum has the homestead set from Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales.

The old trading post now serves as a museum.

A Canadian company once floated a plan to tear the garden down for condominiums.

The name Thanksgiving Point was chosen to express gratitude.

The museum tells how Murray grew from farm country into a booming smelter town.

It began in 1930 when a botany professor started testing plants on university land.

There are over 180 dinosaur tracks inside, most found within 10 to 15 miles of the cave.