L.A.’s newest star isn’t a YouTuber gone viral but an ancient giantess. Meet Gnatalie, an immense long-neck dinosaur—an astonishingly complete sauropod skeleton that greets visitors at the newly transformed $75 million wing of the Natural History Museum. The 75,000-square-foot NHM Commons lives up to its name: this is, above all, a community space. The architecture firm Frederick Fisher and Partners aimed to bring the outdoors in, with a gleaming glass façade that opens up the museum to the surrounding Exposition Park. The new Commons Plaza serves as a vibrant gathering place with a courtyard, amphitheater, and garden. Culture has as much of a place here as science: there are outdoor installations by Tongva artist Lazaro Arvizu, Jr.; the dazzling, once-censored, 80-foot mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, by Barbara Carrasco, depicting the city past and present, woven through the hair of la Reina de Los Ángeles; and the new South LA Café, a mission-driven institution serving horchata lattes and other goodies. A new multi-purpose theater features a plethora of films, educational content co-created with locals, puppet shows, and, yes, dinos, in the splashy new T.REX 3D—narrated, no less, by Jurassic Park actor Sam Neill. Over at Exposition Park, the highly anticipated Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is slated to open in 2026 and the greenspace is undergoing a five-ring transformation for the 2028 Olympic Games.
Correction, March 14
The original version of this story misstated the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art’s opening date. It will open in 2026, not 2025.