Shedd Aquarium
Belugas, Pacific Northwest habitat, Caribbean reef, sharks, freshwater fishes, and active animal care make a historic aquarium read as a network of ecosystems.
Places and wildlife — page 46
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Brookfield Zoo Chicago
Large habitats, conservation programs, historic zoo design, primates, big cats, marine mammals, and children’s areas require a route—not random wandering.
Lincoln Park Zoo
Great apes, lions, hoofed animals, farm habitats, conservation science, gardens, and historic buildings share a compact lakefront neighborhood landscape.
Peoria Zoo
African grasslands, primates, big cats, Australian species, reptiles, and a century-old park setting make close observation possible without an all-day march.
Illinois Chorus Frog
A stout, secretive frog that digs forward through sand spends almost the entire year underground, then announces spring rain with piercing whistles.
Illinois Cave Amphipod
This pale, eyeless crustacean exists only in a small network of southwestern Illinois cave streams, where groundwater quality determines survival.
Kankakee Mallow
A tall pink-flowered mallow known from one small Kankakee River island survives through disturbance, seed longevity, and unusually focused conservation.
Decurrent False Aster
A floodplain aster relative survives where water, sediment, disturbance, and open sun repeatedly reset the Illinois River’s edge.
The Art Institute of Chicago
Seurat, Monet, ancient sculpture, Japanese prints, Chicago design, and a landmark modern wing make this one of America’s essential encyclopedic museums.
Field Museum
SUE the T. rex, Máximo the titanosaur, meteorites, cultural collections, and working laboratories reveal how a research museum builds knowledge.
Griffin Museum of Science and Industry
A captured U-boat, working coal-mine descent, giant model railroad, aircraft, storms, and hands-on experiments fill the last major building of the 1893 fair.
Chicago History Museum
Rail cars, protest materials, neighborhood stories, maps, fashion, and the remnants of the Great Chicago Fire connect civic myth with lived history.
DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center
Art, documents, reconstructed environments, and changing exhibitions connect African civilizations, slavery, Chicago’s Black communities, and national political culture.
Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center
Survivor voices, personal artifacts, a German rail car, and human-rights galleries connect the Holocaust’s chronology to choices made by individuals and institutions.
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
Full-scale environments, original artifacts, political cartoons, theaters, and a research library reconstruct Lincoln’s life while exposing how public memory is made.
Illinois State Museum
Fossils, Ice Age environments, Indigenous archaeology, decorative arts, and changing exhibitions explain Illinois as both a natural system and a human place.
National Museum of Mexican Art
Ancient forms, devotional objects, modern painting, photography, prints, and Chicago-made work present Mexican culture as plural, contemporary, and transnational.
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Changing exhibitions, performance, postwar art, and a terraced Josef Paul Kleihues building make every visit a different proposition about the present.
Adler Planetarium
Historic telescopes, immersive domes, hands-on astronomy, and Chicago’s lakefront horizon connect everyday observation with planetary science.
American Writers Museum
Manuscripts, typewriters, sound, games, changing exhibitions, and a long chronological wall explore how American writing is made, circulated, and contested.
Lincoln Home National Historic Site
Lincoln’s Springfield house and four preserved blocks reveal family life, neighborhood relationships, legal work, and the social world behind a presidency.
Pullman National Historical Park
A planned company town, railcar works, landmark strike, Black labor history, and surviving row houses turn an intact neighborhood into industrial evidence.
Old State Capitol State Historic Site
The 1839 capitol’s recreated legislative rooms frame Lincoln’s House Divided speech, legal career, and the rough mechanics of antebellum Illinois government.
Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site
Log buildings, workshops, farms, and a wooded Sangamon River ridge reconstruct the commercial village where Lincoln worked before moving to Springfield.
Ulysses S. Grant Home State Historic Site
The furnished brick house given to Grant after the Civil War connects national fame with family life, Galena neighbors, and a steep Mississippi River town.
Dana-Thomas House State Historic Site
More than four hundred pieces of Wright-designed art glass, furniture, and ornament make Susan Lawrence Dana’s house an unusually intact total work.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
Five floors of science, world cultures, dinosaurs, art, and play make the world’s largest children’s museum a rare place where preschoolers and adults can stay equally absorbed.
Newfields
Newfields joins the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Lilly House and gardens, seasonal installations, and a 100-acre art-and-nature park into a visit with several distinct rhythms.
Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art
Native art and cultures, Western art, contemporary voices, and Indiana’s own collecting history meet in a museum that rewards careful reading of who is speaking—and when.
Indiana State Museum
Geology, ecology, archaeology, social history, art, and invention turn a state survey into an argument about how place shapes people and how people reshape place.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum
Cars, trophies, driver stories, engineering, strategy, and an active racetrack make the reimagined museum useful even to visitors who do not arrive as racing experts.
Conner Prairie
Prairietown, Lenape interpretation, aviation, animals, nature, and a new indoor museum turn a sprawling living-history campus into more than a costumed village.
Studebaker National Museum
Three floors follow a South Bend company from blacksmith shop to global automaker, using surviving vehicles to make design, labor, ambition, and collapse tangible.
Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum
Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg automobiles occupy the company’s restored 1930 headquarters, where architecture, advertising, engineering, and Indiana manufacturing still speak together.
Indiana Medical History Museum
The 1896 Old Pathology Building preserves laboratories, amphitheater, specimens, records, and uneasy evidence of how psychiatric medicine once pursued knowledge inside Central State Hospital.
WonderLab Museum of Science, Health & Technology
Bubbles, water, forces, live animals, sound, and construction turn a compact downtown museum into a laboratory for testing ideas with hands and bodies.
Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science
Art galleries, regional history, hands-on science, a planetarium, and a preserved train make one Ohio River museum unusually broad without losing its local center.
Eskenazi Museum of Art
Ancient objects, prints, photographs, and modern art meet in a free university museum whose triangular building constantly changes how one work faces another.
Fort Wayne Museum of Art
Changing exhibitions, American glass, works on paper, and regional artists give this downtown museum a focused identity that reaches beyond a single permanent display.
Indiana War Memorial Museum
A limestone memorial, soaring Shrine Room, military artifacts, and Hoosier biographies frame service from the Revolution through recent conflicts without reducing it to hardware.
Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library
Manuscripts, drawings, a typewriter, a Purple Heart, banned-book advocacy, and an Indiana Avenue home place Vonnegut’s jokes inside the moral questions that powered them.
RV/MH Hall of Fame
Early camping trailers, motorhomes, manufactured housing, and industry archives explain why northern Indiana became the center of an American way of travel and building.
CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center
A small museum founded by Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor examines the Holocaust, Mengele’s twin experiments, forgiveness, testimony, and the responsibilities of witnesses.
Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame
Players, coaches, uniforms, photographs, records, and a working court trace high-school basketball as community ritual rather than simply a list of famous careers.
Minnetrista Museum & Gardens
A forty-acre campus connects Ball family homes, design and industry, changing exhibitions, gardens, nature, and the Bob Ross Experience without pretending they are one simple narrative.
NCAA Hall of Champions
Championship artifacts, rankings, athlete stories, retro gym design, and physical interactives make the NCAA’s downtown museum broader than a football-and-basketball trophy room.
Indiana Historical Society
Immersive sets, changing exhibits, a serious research library, and statewide collections let visitors move between performed memory and the documents that support it.
Indiana Bat
A small social bat winters in a few cold caves, migrates to summer forest roosts, and carries the name of the state where science first described it.