A Trip To This New Jersey City Isn’t Complete Without Visiting This 2-Story Museum

New Brunswick and Rutgers University are my old stomping grounds, but Old Rutgers still manages to surprise me. The massive campus is full of little destinations, sights, and museums that are well worth a visit even if you've never attended the school. One fantastic hidden museum in New Brunswick, NJ is located only feet away from the train station, in a stately old building that many people pass by countless times without going in. That's where you'll find the Rutgers Geology Museum, a compact two-story museum filled with fascinating exhibits spotlighting geology, paleontology, and anthropology. The museum had very limited hours for a long time following 2020, but it's back up to normal operations during the school year now - and the best part is, this fascinating museum is completely free to the public!

This historic building in the center of Rutgers campus is hiding a very big - and ancient - secret.

It's the home of the Rutgers Geology Museum, a small but impressive - and completely free - natural history museum hiding on campus.

The first thing you'll notice is the massive mastodon skeleton, an impressive remnant of the ancient mammal that once walked these lands.

Kids will be happy to see all the dinosaur sculptures and fossils filling the place!

Of course, this is a geology museum first and foremost, so there are a lot of impressive collections of rocks and minerals.

There is even a display of fluorescent minerals safely locked away behind glass and shining away.

One of the most surprising exhibits is a display of some of our ancient ancestors, so you can see how humanity evolved.

The second floor has some smaller exhibits, but also creates a very unique vantage point of the museum as a whole.

Have you visited the Rutgers Geology Museum? Let us know your favorite exhibits at this unique museum in New Brunswick, NJ in the comments section! You can find out more about the current hours on the official Rutgers Geology Museum website, and the Geology Museum Facebook page is the best place to find out about upcoming events. If you're planning to make a day of it and explore, check out our past coverage on why New Brunswick is the best college town in New Jersey. It's also home to one of the state's best upscale hotels - The Heldrich.