Riverside Metropolitan Museum

The most wonderful place on Earth. I love the museum and all of its attractions from Taxidermy animals native to the area and surrounding areas too art and pictures of the History of Riverside which is all incredible. There is much to learn and especially on the second floor there is a Nature Lab open Mondays through to the weekend on some dates and has live animals from turtles on land and in water, frogs, cockraoches of Madagascar, snakes, tarantula, fish, crayfish, scorpion, and the list goes on. Very very great people throughout the entire museum especially Danielle and Teresa, and shout out to the Nature Lab volunteers and student workers your doing a great job keep it up! See you at the museum!

This is a cute little museum, especially if you like fauna and whatnot, because they have a lot of animals from this area to look at. If they had more displays of people, culture, or artifacts from sites than animals, this place would be perfect. It’s a nice place to visit if you happen to be downtown, and just about the only museum like it in the immediate area. Beat the heat during summer and spend a couple of hours here after lunch downtown.

Perfect place to get away. Great for kids great for people who like to learn and see how times past have shaped the future. From Indians to old army uniforms. Local artifacts to stuffed animals.

This museum has very interesting exhibits. The animal exibit is interactive for the children. Plus, the employee’s are very helpful

Went through during the Dickens Festival. Seeing people in Victorian garb walking through this historic building, seemed to add to the experience.
A lot of it was closed off as they appeared to be doing some remodeling. Pretty neat museum, and it’s FREE.
There’s a lab upstairs with live animals (lizards, fish, frogs, spiders and insects mostly) and volunteers cleaning up recently uncovered fossils that were shipped to the museum. The volunteers in there are very kind and love answering questions and letting you get a closer look at whatever’s in there.
Mission Inn Ave is also pretty cool with all the old buildings and the pagoda across the street. It’s worth a nice day trip if you’ve got something to go to in the area.

I came here last week to try and explore the Riverside area. This is a pretty small museum, with about 4 exhibits and a nature lab. They currently have an area dedicated to Riverside’s history with the citrus industry, several quilt displays talking about the significance of quilts in culture, an area about the desert wildlife, and I went to visit on the opening day of a «Peanuts» exhibit (yes, the cartoon by Charles Schultz).
It was mildly interesting. It is a piece of culture in Riverside, though it only took my boyfriend and I maybe 30 – 45 minutes to look at everything we wanted to see. The «Peanuts» exhibit has a collection of different memorabilia collected by locals and also explanations of Schultz’s work/​life and his characters.
This is probably someplace I would go once just to see what it’s like and not return… unless there was a new exhibit that really caught my eye. It’s definitely somewhere nice for parents to take their kids to come and learn and do hands on activities.

nice small-​town museum, i used to go here a lot as a kid. exhibits on local history, native americans, animals (i seem to remember a sabre-​toothed tiger?), geology & the citrus & aluminum industries. what can i say, i was a nerdy kid. located in the heart of «bustling» downtown riverside.