Natural History Museum of UtahThe copper-clad Rio Tinto Center in the Salt Lake foothills — Utah's dinosaurs, a five-story Past Worlds gallery, and Great Salt Lake science

The Natural History Museum of Utah moved into the purpose-built Rio Tinto Center in 2011, trading its cramped old campus quarters for a 163,000-square-foot building set directly into the Wasatch foothills above the University of Utah. Architects clad it in copper panels — a nod to Utah's mining heritage — and terraced it up the slope so the structure reads almost as an extension of the canyon strata behind it, with a public city-and-valley overlook on the upper levels.

The collections are the draw. Utah holds one of the most prolific dinosaur fossil records anywhere, and the museum's Past Worlds gallery makes the most of it: a five-story hall of mounted skeletons, a celebrated wall of ceratopsian (horned-dinosaur) skulls largely unearthed from the state's southern badlands, and active paleo-prep visible through glass. From there the galleries climb through the Great Salt Lake's strange ecology, the gems and minerals of the region, the peoples and First Nations of the Colorado Plateau, and a sky-and-land level that ties it back to the landscape outside.

The building is designed to be walked from the bottom up, with ramps and terraces leading you level to level and out onto the overlook. Plan two to three hours, more with kids in the hands-on Our Backyard family space, and leave a few minutes for the exterior terraces — the view back over the Salt Lake Valley is part of the experience. It sits at the east edge of the city, a 15-minute drive from Temple Square and downtown.