Founded in 1952, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is widely recognized throughout the world as a model institution for innovative presentation and interpretation of native plants and animals featured together in ecological exhibits. The Museum is regularly listed as one of the top ten zoological parks in the world because of its unique approach to interpreting the complete natural history of a single region (in our case this is the Sonoran Desert and adjacent ecosystems). This represents a significant achievement, as the Museum’s collections and size are smaller than many of its counterparts. Not a “museum” in the usual sense, it is an unparalleled composite of plant, animal, and geologic collections with the goal of making the Sonoran Desert accessible, understandable, and treasured.

Today, this approach can be most easily understood by noting that the collections consist of 2,744 animals (representing 320 vertebrate and invertebrate taxa); 1,217 plant taxa cataloged (an estimated 72,000 plants are found on the grounds, but most are in the natural desert areas and are not accessioned); and 14,482 rock and mineral specimens (including 2,068 fossils). More than 175 of the plants and animals in the collection are of conservation concern in the Sonoran Desert region.