Russian scholars, such as Pyotr Kozlov, V. I. Lisovskii, A. D. Simukov, and the American researcher Roy Chapman Andrews contributed to the museum's early collections and exhibits.

In the socialist period, all collections of historical, ethnographical, natural history and paleontological were housed in the building of the State Central Museum, which was built in 1956.

The ethnographic collection has significant displays of the traditional dress of various Mongolian ethnic groups and of snuff bottles.

The museum publishes one or more issues of its in-house journal each year, with articles in Mongolian and foreign languages, including Russian and English.

The National Museum of Mongolia is the nation's largest museum and holds a collection of over 57,000 objects relating to Central Asian history and the history of Mongolia from prehistory to the end of the 20th century, with a portion of the collected artifacts on display in ten exhibition halls.