Sternberg Museum of Natural History

The museum carries the name of a family. Dr. George M. Sternberg, an army surgeon who later became Surgeon General, was posted to Fort Harker in 1866, took up fossils from the sandstone there and bought a ranch nearby. He brought in his brother Charles H. Sternberg to help run it, and Charles became a professional collector who dug for both Cope and Marsh in the Bone Wars. His three sons, George F., Charles M. and Levi, followed him; George F. found a plesiosaur when he was nine.

The college at Hays, founded in 1902, began with donated specimens scattered through its offices, then a room in Picken Hall with its first curator, C. W. Miller, in 1914, and then McCartney Hall, built as library and museum together. George F. Sternberg was put in charge of building it up, and in 1952 he collected its best-known piece, a Xiphactinus with a Gillicus inside it. After his death in 1969 it was named for the family. The campus sits on a floodplain and floods damaged the collections more than once, so in 1994 the university bought the dome by the interstate, and the merged collections became the present museum, with a Cretaceous sea diorama and a hands-on Discovery Room.

Its future is not settled. In 2026 the university's foundation said the museum must raise $1,000,000 by December 31 to stay open, with gifts matched by the Bob and Pat Schmidt Foundation.