University of Kansas Natural History Museum, Natural history research museum at University of Kansas, United States.
The University of Kansas Natural History Museum is a natural history museum housed in Dyche Hall, a four-story building made of local Oread limestone on the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence. It holds collections of plants, animals, fossils, and archaeological objects gathered from many regions and time periods.
Dyche Hall was completed in 1903 in the Richardsonian Romanesque style and named after Lewis Lindsay Dyche, a naturalist who built up major collections for the university in the late 1800s. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and is also recognized on the Register of Historic Kansas Places.
The museum sits at the center of student life on the University of Kansas campus and is visited by both students and families from the surrounding region. Inside, the collections reflect a long tradition of fieldwork and research that faculty and students have carried out across the Great Plains and beyond.
The museum is on the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence and can be reached on foot from the main campus areas. Admission is free, and the four floors are easy to navigate without following a set order.
The Panorama of North American Wildlife on display here was first shown at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where it drew wide attention. Lewis Lindsay Dyche assembled it himself, and it remains one of the few surviving large-scale dioramas from that era still on public display.
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