[2][3] The Natural History Society was founded by George W. Barnes, Daniel Cleveland, Charles Coleman, E. W. Hendrick and O. N.

[8] In 1887, the Society was given a lot on Sixth Avenue between B and C streets by E. W. Morse, a former president of the city's short-lived Lyceum of Natural Sciences.

[2] In 1910, the San Diego Society of Natural History hired Kate Stephens, an authority on terrestrial and marine mollusks, as curator for its collections.

[9] These included the personal collection of her husband, mammalogist and ornithologist Frank Stephens, who donated over 2000 bird and mammal specimens to the Society in 1910.

[10] In June 1912, Katherine and Frank Stephens installed the Society's first museum exhibits at the Hotel Cecil, where they could be viewed by the public on selected afternoons.

The Society moved its growing collections and library into the building in February 1917, thus creating the San Diego Natural History Museum.

[20][21] In 1932, San Diego's leading architect, William Templeton Johnson, was commissioned by the Society of Natural History to design its new museum building on Balboa Park's East Prado.

The north and east exterior facades were left plain as temporary walls slated for future expansion, and remained so for 60 years.

[1][23] The Society was notified on March 8, 1943, that the United States Navy wished to take over the Natural History Museum[2] for hospital use at once, becoming the infectious diseases ward.

Some renovation took place in the facility, including the addition of an elevator designed to handle hospital gurneys and a nurses' station between floors.

[30] In 2016, Judy Gradwohl succeeded Hager as President and CEO, the first women to hold the position in the museum's 150 year history.

In December 2009, the San Diego Natural History Museum was awarded the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design−LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (LEED-EB: O&M) Certification.

[37] In 2016, the museum renovated space in the Research Library to create the Eleanor and Jerome Navarra Special Collections Gallery, which contains the new permanent exhibition, Extraordinary Ideas From Ordinary People: A History of Citizen Science.

[40] In 2017, the museum drew on the abundance of material in its collections to create the new exhibition, Unshelved – Cool Stuff from Storage.

[42] In 2003, the museum presented a major showing of paintings from its collection in the exhibition Plant Portraits: The California Legacy of A.R.

[45] The museum serves as the major biodiversity repository in the region, conducting field research across a range of scientific disciplines and providing an important source of flora and fauna distributional data for environmental systems protection, land use planning, environmental surveys, and development mitigation.

The expeditions also support the enhancement of the institutions' scientific collections, conservation efforts, management of natural resources, and environmental education.

[48] The San Jacinto Resurvey, conducted by the museum in cooperation with the Universities of California, Berkeley and Riverside from 2008 to 2010, retraced the 1908 expedition of Joseph Grinnell and associates to the San Jacinto Mountains in Riverside County to make a detailed comparison of how the region's wildlife changed over the century.

Fish & Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, James San Jacinto Mountain Reserve, UCNRS, and the Big Bear Zoo, was launched to determine the distribution and habitat use of the San Bernardino Flying Squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus californicus) and incorporates the iNaturalist platform to allow citizen scientists to upload their observations to databases used by scientists.

The collection consists primarily of vascular plants, with significant holdings of marine algae, mostly of the eastern North Pacific.

[56] Recent work includes research on floristic diversity in the southwestern United States and northwestern Baja California.

[57][58] The Botany Department provides online access to records via two portals, the Flora of Baja California[59] and the San Diego County Plant Atlas, with most specimens georeferenced.

[60] In addition, the Botany Department has fully indexed and published online the field books of botanist Reid Moran.

The insect collection is especially strong in Coleoptera and Lepidoptera; smaller but important holdings include Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Neuroptera.

Both regional and worldwide species are well represented in the collection, with specimens from throughout the southwest United States, northwest Mexico, and islands globally.

The department hosts the Amphibian and Reptile Atlas of Peninsular California documenting biodiversity research using both Museum collection data and field observations from citizen scientists.

In addition, the Library's art collection includes treasures such as the botanical watercolors of A. R. Valentien and wildlife paintings by George Miksch Sutton and Allan Brooks.

In-depth volumes of Memoirs have treated topics comprehensively, while shorter works, often written for a more general non-technical audience, have been published as Occasional Papers.