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National Museum of Natural History was established in 1889 as a Natural History Museum of Prince Ferdinand. It was opened for visitors in 1907. In 1974 the National Museum of Natural History was determined as an independent institute in the BAS system.

Currently the museum has three main sections: geology, zoology and botany. With its rich scientific collections and exhibition the National Museum of Natural History is the most representative institution of its kind in Bulgaria, the first and most extensive Museum of Natural History on the Balkans.

In its collection are included 400 species of mammals, over 1 200 species of birds, hundreds of thousands of insects and other invertebrates - collected over more than a hundred years. The collections of the museum store even rare species that have already disappeared. This is the only place where you can see the Bearded Vulture and the Lily Crane, who once inhabited the Bulgarian nature. Just one visit won’t be enough to learn and remember the names of the countless parrots and other birds, the species of turtles, rhinos and reptiles - snakes, frogs, crocodiles and other representatives of the animal world. There have been described many new species to science on the basis of extensive material collected not only in Bulgaria but also in 60 other countries. Vast are the contributions of the Academician Ivan Buresh, director of the museum from 1914 to 1947, who turned the museum into a modern center of zoology and botany.

In 1995, based on the collections of the biology teacher Dimitar Kovachev, in Asenovgrad was created very interesting branch of the museum that holds a unique collection of fossil mammals.

After the first floor, which acquaints visitors with various rocks and minerals, on the second start the botanical and zoological exhibitions. On the third floor are exposed one of the last pure wisents, that lived in Europe. There also is a standing on legs hind legs brown bear from Rila, that won a gold medal at the International Hunting Exhibition in Berlin in 1937. Visitors can enjoy the dioramas, depicting scenes from the lives of the large predators in the equatorial forests of the Americas and Asia.

Natural History Museum is a major national center and one of Europe's leading research facilities on cave fauna. It works on the scientific basis for establishing new protected areas.

The museum holds extremely rich collection of insects. The funds of the department store more than 500 boxes of pinned specimens, whose number exceeds half a million. Besides their scientific value, some of the collections are of historical importance. For example, the largest collection of butterflies of Prince Ferdinand and Tsar Boris III, which consists of 240 boxes of material collected in Central Europe and the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Systematic enrichment with foreign materials from the collection of non-insect invertebrates became especially intense after 1974.

The museum store and a significant part of the remarkable collection of Aegean flora collected by Alexi Petrov: giant lobsters, molluscs, corals and others. This fund keeps over 5 000 exhibits.