Enjoy free general admission for you and a guest to the Virginia Museum of Natural History and hundreds of museums and cultural venues nationwide on Smithsonian magazine's Museum Day, Saturday, September 24, 2011.

Present the Museum Day admission card to receive free general admission at the Virginia Museum of Natural History and other participating Museum Day locations. The admission card is available in the September 2011 issue of Smithsonian magazine and is downloadable at the Museum Day site.

The museum will present a series of special Smithsonian films in the Walker Lecture Hall on Museum Day.  The programs to be shown are part of the “Stories From the Vaults” series, presented by Smithsonian Networks. Below is the schedule:

Stories from the Vaults: Famous Donors
Tom takes us back to the origins of the Smithsonian's collections. He explores Teddy Roosevelt's hunting trophies, John Steinbeck's sea urchins, and Phyllis Diller's joke file. Add these to the roughly fifty thousand items donated annually, and you get a sense of the immense number of artifacts the Smithsonian holds in its museums. Showing at 9:00; 10:00; 11:00; Noon; 1:00; 2:00; 3:00; 4:00

Stories from the Vaults: Life after Death
The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of Natural History, and the National Postal Museum all hold clues to the afterlife. Deep inside their vaults, the evidence for life after death has never been more convincing.  Showing at 9:30; 10:30; 11:30; 12:30; 1:30; 2:30; 3:30; 4:30

Become a VMNH Member today to receive this and other great benefits, including unlimited admission to the museum throughout the year, admission to the museum's spectacular family festivals, invitations to exhibit opening receptions, a subscription to the VMNH quarterly newsletter "Virginia, Naturally", and much more.  Learn more about becoming a member of the Virginia Museum of Natural History.