Exploring the Denver Museum of Nature and Science

If you’re planning a trip to Denver, add this to your list of things to see! Here’s a few highlights from our trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (it’s very kid-friendly!)

A couple weekends ago we went down to Denver to visit family and we went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We had thought about going to the zoo, but we weren’t sure what the weather was going to do, so we opted to go indoors. We LOVE science, so we had a lot of fun at the museum 🙂

If you have never been to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, you should check it out! They have a lot of great hands-on things for kids to do throughout the museum! Here are some of the highlights from our trip to the museum:

The view of city park and downtown Denver from the Anschutz sky terrace

We spent several hours at the museum (there’s a lot to see!), but we spent quite a bit of time in the Viking exhibit. I didn’t get as many photos of the other areas of the museum as much as the Viking stuff. We were pretty excited to see that one!

I was really looking forward to seeing the ancient Egypt exhibit since I loved everything ancient Egypt when I was growing up (I even have hieroglyph dictionaries at home!). It was pretty small, but they had some interesting things to see. I didn’t get any photos of the mummies, but they had 2 of them.

Volunteers at the museum spent almost 2 years studying and creating a replica Egyptian coffin using the techniques of the ancient Egyptians.

Vikings: Beyond the Legend exhibit

The Viking exhibit costs a little extra to get into (above the cost of the museum), but we felt it was worth it since we spent quite a bit of time looking around. They had a lot of great stuff in this exhibit so there was a lot to see!

While many people think that Vikings were very warlike people (some of them were), most of the Viking people were farmers.

It’s pretty cool that they included a Viking bread recipe! You can also download this recipe on the museum website.

The Viking exhibit had several hands-on areas, like this one above with replica Viking clothing. They also had some volunteers who were storytelling Viking tales and spinning wool.

The lighting in many of the exhibits at the museum didn’t have great lighting for photographs. Thanks goodness for Lightroom!

My husband was pretty excited to see an Ulfberht sword at the exhibit. Ulfberht swords (made between 800 and 1000 AD) were well ahead of their time in terms of quality and metallurgy. No one since has been able to create an Ulfberht sword that is metallurgically the same as those created over 1000 years ago. Pretty amazing!!

Our Vikings 😉 They were giving out paper Viking helmets at the end of the exhibit, so everyone got to take something home

A replica Viking ship outside the exhibit – where the lighting is MUCH better!

Fun photo opp!

The main halls of the museum had some amazing dinosaur bones

Expedition Health

The Expedition Health exhibit at the museum was really cool. When you go in, you can get a card that tracks your information as you go from station to station, then at the end it will print out your stats. Some of the stations you could check your heart rate, your stride length, or your arm span/height ratio.

There were plenty of plasticized body parts (and 1 full body, below) to visualize different areas of the human body, like the blood vessels or the nerves.

The exhibit had a fun hand’s on area for lab experiments. Each station had a different experiment you could do, but the one we did was all about how soaps and antibacterial agents kill bacteria. The computer program had easy to follow videos walking you through each step of the experiment. It was very cool!

 This experiment station was all about testing breakfast cereal for certain nutrients.

The space exhibit was fun! They have a cool Mars rover area (missed getting photos of that!)

I didn’t get any photos of the gems and minerals exhibit, which I wish I had since that’s one of my favorites too! In the end, our time had run out and the museum was closing soon, so we didn’t get to see everything there. There will still be plenty to see the next time we go!