Adjacent to the Centennial Concert Hall, at the corner of Main Street and Rupert Avenue, sits the Manitoba Museum & Planetarium, the province’s most visited paid travel destination. Since 1932 a small museum devoted to nature and history had been housed alongside the Winnipeg Art Gallery at the Winnipeg Civic Auditorium on Memorial Boulevard. In 1961, in light of the discussion of a new Manitoba Centennial Centre, the Manitoba Museum Association started planning a new, much larger location. Four years later the provincial government incorporated two new organizations: the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature and the Manitoba Planetarium. (The two were joined in July of 1972.) The new facilities were unveiled gradually; a large Planetarium was opened in May of 1968, followed on 15 July 1970 with the inauguration by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of the the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature Orientation and Grasslands galleries. The collection of the previous Manitoba Museum was the basis for the museum – amongst it the bones of an ancient plesiosaur and a collection of works by pioneering nineteenth-century Canadian artist Paul Kane. Over the years, the original two galleries were joined by spaces devoted to earth history and sea-trading (1973), urban life (1974), the Canadian arctic and sub-arctic (1976), the Boreal forest (1980), the Hudson’s Bay Company collection (2000), Manitoba’s Parklands and mixed-woods area (2003) and ancient sea life (2010).