Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Welcome to the Family Reunion!

What has hair, special ear bones, gives birth to live young, and can be found all over the world in all shapes and sizes? Mammals, of course!

Posed from the floor to the ceiling, the animals in this exhibition range from the familiar Eastern gray squirrel to the rare okapi, a central African mammal so shy scientists didn’t know it existed until the early 1900s. Each provides a snapshot of life on Earth, while the Evolution Theater features an eight-minute film surveying the mammal family tree and the vast changes its members have been through in the past 225 million years.

Did you know?

The Hall features 274 exciting mammals and dozens of fossils in a variety of environments.

Look For

a statue of an extinct mammal in bronze — A bronze recreation of Morganucadon oehleri, one of the earliest-known mammals, which lived 210 million years ago

a white rhino sits in the museum mammals hall — A white rhinoceros collected by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909

An echidna specimen in the Mammal Hall — A short-beaked echidna, one of only two types of monotremes, or egg-laying mammals

Things To Do

Reach into a hibernating squirrel’s burrow and feel how low its body temperature can drop.
Listen to bushbabies (small primates also called galagos) calling to each other in the tree canopy of a central African woodland.
Discover the three important features that all mammals—including us!—have in common.

Experience More

First Floor | Exhibit

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