The museum shows exhibits of natural history subjects, with an emphasis on Utah and the Intermountain West.

[citation needed] The museum was conceived in 1959, when the University of Utah faculty committee decided to consolidate natural history collections from around its campus.

It all began when a young local paleontologist called James Henry Madsen Jr. obtained his Master of Science in 1959 in the University of Utah.

The following year, as of 1960, Madsen was hired as an assistant for Professor William Lee Stokes of the Princeton University, who at that time performed the dauntless project to extensively dig the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry.

Since the 1920s, it had been firmly established by geologists that this quarry is one of the most important paleontological sites ever found in the United States, and still in the early 1960s tens of thousands of disarticulated dinosaur bones were buried in the rock, awaiting to be excavated.

To continue financing his research, Madsen founded Dinolab, a company that cast and sold skeletons of dinosaurs to museums, institutions, or private buyers.

[9] In 2011, the museum moved from the old George Thomas Library location at 1390 Presidents Circle into the Rio Tinto Center, in the University of Utah's Research Park 301 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City.

[11] The building's highest point is a round structure on the back or east side which houses the Native Voices gallery.

[citation needed] The museum is a repository for collections that were accumulated by the university's departments of Anthropology, Biology, and Geology.

[citation needed] In-service training is offered by the Utah Museum of Natural History Education Department; university credit can be earned with these courses, leading to salary lane changes for public school teachers.

As the founder of the university's Genetic Science Learning Center, the museum continues to partner in its teacher training program.