Located on the University of Kansas campus in Dyche Hall at 14th Street and Jayhawk Boulevard, the museum was built in 1902. As visitors enter the museum on the third floor, they will see an enormous diorama of stuffed animals known as the Kansas Pavilion Panorama of North American Mammals. This exhibit was created for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago by KU natural history professor Dr. Lewis Lindsey Dyche. The Pavilion contains 121 mammals situated in their respective North American Life Zones. The animals include: black bear, mountain lion, coyote, deer, elk, mountain goats, bison, grizzly bear, moose (two fighting males), polar bears, wolverines, musk ox, caribou, harbor seal, walrus, harp seal, gray seal, and smaller mammals.
Paleontology exhibits include dioramas of Niobrara Chalk fossils and Mosasaurs of Kansas (Tylosaurus dyspelor, Tylosaurus proriger, Platecarpus coryphaeus, Clidastes tortor, and Ichthyodectes arcuatus). Smaller dioramas include Permian Amphibians, Late Devonian Fishes, Rancho La Brea dig site, Early Devonian Vertebrates, Permian Reptiles (such as Dimetrodon), Hyracotherium, sabre-toothed cat and camel, extinct bison, and a Mastodon display. Other paleontology exhibits include fossil trackways, fossil turtles, the short-necked Cretaceous Plesiosaur Trinacromerium osborni, the Pterosaur Pteranodon ingens, and Bambiraptor feinbergi. Visitors can also see skulls of Triceratops prorsus, the Triassic Phytosaur Angistorhinus, and the Cretaceous Plesiosaur Brachauchenius lucasi. Extinct mammal skeletons include Pleistocene bighorn sheep Ovis catclawensis, American cheetah Miracinonyx trumani, woodland muskox Bootherium cavifrons, short-legged rhinoceros Teleoceras fossiger, Bison occidentalis, Miocene rhinoceros Menoceras arikarense, Canis dirus, Smilodon californicus, and a giant ground sloth.
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The Jungle Lab--A Rainforest Discovery Space has live tropical fish, green iguanas, frogs, a python, and plants. It also has dioramas of a cheetah and sloth. There is a Parasaurolophus walkeri skeleton in the stairwell and a Tylosaur skeleton on the fourth floor above the main entrance. The fifth floor is mostly filled by the crouching skeleton of a Jurassic Camarasaur found in 1998 in Wyoming's Black Hills, along with a touchable femur.
The sixth floor is sort of a catchall space of the museum, it contains several stuffed animals and dioramas, such as an African lion. Birds are represented with an American eagle and several other large stuffed birds, as well as Birds in Kansas Wetlands and Birds in Kansas. Other exhibits include Changing Rivers, modern American fishermen, a West Indian Manatee skeleton, Nightfall on the High Plains rotating diorama, the Truth About Feathers, Schizochroism (the lack of one pigment normally present in feathers, unlike true albinism), and the Art of Taxidermy.
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