The museum will be closed on Thursday, November 28 for the Thanksgiving holiday. We will reopen on Friday, November 29.

BE ADVISED: On Saturday 11/30, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will host the USC vs. Notre Dame football game. Kickoff is at 12:30 pm. This event will impact traffic, parking, and wayfinding in the area due to street closures. Please consider riding the Metro E (Expo) Line and exiting at USC/Expo station.

Tools and Services

Paleontological record searches

We perform searches of our paleontology collection records for qualified contractors and environmental consultants.  For detailed information and fees, visit our records search program page.

Research equipment

Research equipment and tools in Research & Collections are available to all Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County staff, research associates, and students.

This equipment is also available to qualified external researchers when possible. 

  • Hitachi scanning electron microscope (with part-time technical support staff)
  • Keyence high resolution digital microscope
  • Horiba XGT-7200 X-ray Fluorescence Microscope
  • Horiba ExploRa+ dispersive Raman microscope
  • Rigaku R-Axis II for X-ray diffraction
  • Optix Escan2.0 laser surface scanner 
  • Lulzbot Taz6 3D printer 
  • Node license for VG StudioMax 

For access to any of the above instruments, please contact Jody Martin at jmartin@nhm.org.

Research visits

Many of our collections are able to host visitors who need to see objects or documents for research, education, artistic, or other purposes.  Visits should be discussed and arranged in advance with the collections manager in your department of interest.  Please be aware that not all objects are available for study, and that our ability to host visitors always depends on our having the space and staff available to accommodate them.  For visit information specific to the COVID pandemic, please check our COVID collections status update.

Research loans

We make loans from our collection to peer institutions and their staff and students for use in research, education, exhibitions, and other projects.  See our Collection Policies page for more information on our loan requirements and how to make a request.