Founded in Dalian City of Liaoning Province in 1959, the Dalian Natural History Museum is a museum of natural history displaying rare stones, fossils, animals and plants, etc. The museum occupies an area of 5,100 square meters, 2,470 square meters of which are for exhibition halls.

The museum has a collection of 50,000 items, of which 264 pieces are of the national first class, including world-precious fossils of whale, white-flag dolphin, panda, snub-nosed monkey, platypus, and the bird of paradise, etc. The fossil of a black back-bare whale in the showcase, which is 17.1 meters long and weighs 66.7 tons, is the biggest extant one of its kind in Asia. The magic exhibit is an ancient lotus seed of 821 to 1251 years old, which is still abloom. The museum also keeps a complete set of insect samples from Taiwan Province, a large number of insect samples from other places in the world, and rock mineral samples from Germany, Japan, Korea and the former Soviet Union.

The basic displays in the museum include Halobios, Geology and Minerals, Genesis of Human Being, and Animals and Plants, exhibiting 4,853 pieces of specimens, of which halobioses from the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea highlight their local flavors. The display of the large-sized cetaceous samples in the museum holds a leading position in China. Besides, the museum often holds exhibitions on various special topics such as the Exhibition of Hairy People in China, the Exhibition of Insects in the World, the Exhibition of the South Pole, and the Exhibition of the South China Sea, etc.

The museum has also collaborated with others on some books on animals and plants. Its bookHairy People in Chinawon the national second prize of excellent books on science and technology in 1983, andthe Survey of the Snake Islandwon the provincial level prize of key technological achievements in 1978.

In addition, the museum often carries out academic exchanges with institutions abroad. In September 1984, the Kyushu Natural History Museum of Japan was invited to stage the Exhibition of Insects in the World in the museum. In August 1986, the museum was invited to launch the Exhibition of Birds and Beasts in Northeast China in two Japanese cities.