Qualla: Virginia Museum of Natural History

Virginia Museum of Natural History: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil Pezzoni, CC BY 4.0. The stromatolite is more than five feet across and weighs more than two tons - a fossilized cabbage of ancient blue-green bacteria, preserved for hundreds of millions of years and now mounted in a museum gallery in a small Virginia city most travelers cannot point to on a map. Visitors walk past it on their way to the Allosaurus skeleton overhead and miss what they have just seen. The stromatolite head is the largest complete specimen of its kind ever found in Virginia, possibly one of the largest complete heads in the world. It is also one of those objects that explains why the Virginia Museum of Natural History exists - and why the choice to put it in Martinsville rather than Richmond or Charlottesville turns out, on reflection, to make perfect sense. The museum is the official natural history museum of the Commonwealth of Virginia. It opened to the public in 1985, became a state agency in 1988, has been accredited by the American Alliance of Museums since 1994, and holds more than 22 million catalogued items - including the stromatolite, the Allosaurus, a 14-million-year-old baleen whale, and a Pteranodon hanging in the same hall.

Image: Neil Pezzoni | CC BY 4.0

Virginia Museum of Natural History: The Boaz Foundation

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil Pezzoni, CC BY 4.0. In 1984 Dr. Noel T. Boaz and Dr. Dorothy Dechant Boaz - paleoanthropologists by training - founded what they called the Boaz Foundation as a private institution. On June 2, 1985, they opened the doors to the public under a new name: the Virginia Museum of Natural History. The loc...

Image: Neil Pezzoni | CC BY 4.0

Virginia Museum of Natural History: The Hall of Ancient Life

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James St. John, CC BY 2.0. The first thing visitors see beyond the ticket booth is the Harvest Foundation Hall of Ancient Life - a soaring space lit by skylights and dominated by mounted skeletons. An Allosaurus, the late Jurassic predator that hunted the western interior of North America around 150 millio...

Image: James St. John | CC BY 2.0

Virginia Museum of Natural History: Uncovering Virginia

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Warner, CC BY 2.0. The most distinctive gallery in the museum is called Uncovering Virginia, and it does something most natural history museums do not attempt. The exhibit recreates six actual research sites in the Commonwealth where VMNH scientists have worked - from a 700-million-year-old Precamb...

Image: Mark Warner | CC BY 2.0

Virginia Museum of Natural History: Twenty-Two Million Items

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit roanokecollege, CC BY 2.0. Behind the public galleries, the museum's research collections hold more than 22 million catalogued items. The departments include Invertebrate Paleontology, Vertebrate Paleontology, Recent Invertebrates, Archaeology, Mammalogy, Marine Science, and Earth Science. The number is st...

Image: roanokecollege | CC BY 2.0

Virginia Museum of Natural History: Smithsonian Affiliate in a Small Town

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil Pezzoni, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Virginia Museum of Natural History is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution - one of the perks of being a state museum at this caliber, and a relationship that pulls traveling exhibits and research collaborations to a city that would not otherwise see them. The museum r...

Image: Neil Pezzoni | CC BY-SA 4.0