The National Museum of Scotland was born in 1985 thanks to a parliamentary law of the United Kingdom.

The museum as it is today, is an institution in turn established in 2006 by the union of the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (National Museum of Scotland) and the Royal Scottish Museum (Royal Scottish Museum, so baptized in 1995). These two museums are arranged in two separate but connected buildings. The Museum of Scotland is housed in a modern building inaugurated in 1998 and the building of the Royal Museum, whose construction began in 1861, was partially opened to the public in 1866 and is in a neo-Romanesque style.

Inside the National Museum of Scotland there are the collections of the two previous museums from which it was formed: these are in particular archaeological finds and medieval objects from Scotland but the museum houses artifacts originating from all over the world in the geological field, archaeological, scientific, technological, artistic and natural history. The tunnels also contain the embalmed body of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to have been successfully cloned.