The Colorado Museum Of Natural History

The Colorado Museum of Natural History, doing business as the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, is a Denver-based tax-exempt nonprofit organization that acts as a federal grant recipient in paleontology, natural history collections stewardship, and museum operations, with no federal contract work. The museum operates as a prime recipient on 88 of its 89 federal awards (99%), with a single sub-award on a Colorado Tourism Office grant.

The museum's federal grant footprint centers on natural sciences and humanities research funding. The National Science Foundation is the dominant customer by award count (18 awards across Environmental Biology, Earth Sciences, and Biological Infrastructure programs), followed by the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (13 awards), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (8 awards), the National Endowment for the Humanities (6 awards), and the Department of the Interior National Park Service (4 awards). The top five funding agencies account for 55% of recent award volume. Potential value concentration is highly dispersed: the top five customers by potential value cover only 33% of combined value, with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Shared Services Center and NASA Headquarters anchoring two grants for $900 thousand and $272 thousand respectively.

Representative grant work includes a $944,518 Museums for America award (CFDA 45.301) from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, effective September 1, 2026, through February 28, 2029, to rehouse, catalog, and digitize a Cretaceous vertebrate fossil collection from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, with deliverables including 400 high-resolution 3D surface scans published online; a $1,282,009 Geosciences project grant (CFDA 47.050) from NSF's Division of Earth Sciences running through August 31, 2028, to conduct paleontological and geochemical analyses of ecosystem recovery following the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction; a $300,663 collaborative research award (CFDA 47.074) from NSF's Division of Environmental Biology spanning July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2030, investigating terrestrial biodiversity dynamics during the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum with a US-South Africa partnership; and a $137,326 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act program grant (CFDA 15.922) from the National Park Service through March 31, 2027, supporting consultation and documentation activities related to Cheyenne and Arapaho collections. The museum also holds a cooperative agreement with the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management to prepare, stabilize, house, and catalog vertebrate fossils from the Fruitland and Kirtland Formations, running through September 30, 2026.

Award activity remains modest and episodic: four awards in 2021, declining to two in 2022, then increasing to four in 2023, three in 2025, and one in 2026. Combined potential value across all 89 awards totals $3.5 million, though combined obligated dollars reach $33.6 million—a ratio indicating substantial invoice history and prior-year funding. Only one award faces ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months, presenting minimal recompete exposure in that window. The museum's work is characterized by paleontology, fossil collections curation and digitization, museum stewardship, and research infrastructure development, performed at the Denver headquarters and at field sites in the Rocky Mountain region and internationally.