I didn’t even know that example existed.  This is a great find.  And I knew that we had American lions, but somehow this just brings it home.  They roamed our plains… and we took them out.

The whole thing is mysterious and sad.

I went to the Buffalo Museum of Science lots of times as a kid, and I went again a few years ago. I know there are a few unique things on display, but nothing particularly interesting sticks out in my mind. I looked at their website recently, and found out that they were taking out some of my favorite things, like the dinosaur fossil section – which was pretty pathetic compared to the big museums, but still exciting for a kid.

I fear that as smaller museums try to modernize – which they unfortunately need to in order to secure continuous funding – many of these unique things will disappear, and they’ll all start to seem the same (which many already do).

There’s one wall that has a huge collection of preserved hummingbirds and it’s laid out in a this huge shimmering iridescent wave. Kinda morbid and wonderful all at once…

Also – the world’s only mounted Kronosaurus!

Frankly, she’s not even the best part of the Dyche Museum. 360-degree, multi-biome diorama, anyone? 

The thing that stuck with me about Blue Babe was that the team that took over from the miners who discovered the carcass and dug it out, celebrated the end of their dig with bowls of prehistoric bison stew. According to Cecil Adams of Straight Dope: “One of the best-documented accounts of a prehistoric meal comes at the end of Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe (1990), by Alaska zoology professor Dale Guthrie. After successfully
unearthing and preserving “Blue Babe,” a 36,000-year-old steppe bison found near Fairbanks in 1979, Guthrie’s team celebrates by simmering some leftover flesh from Babe’s neck “in a pot of stock and vegetables.” The author reports that “the meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma.”" IIRC, the UAF museum used to include a paragraph along the lines of “If you find a bison in the tundra, please call us and refrain from eating it. Prehistoric bison meat will contain poisonous metals.” in a brochure about Blue Babe.

In other news, the Oakland Museum has an amazing California History display.  Waaaay cooler than I remember it being when I was a kid.  

Harvard Museum of Natural History

Glass flowers!

Along I-70 in the western part of the state you can find brochures for a plethora of small fossil museums.

And the Natural History Museum in Lawrence, KS, is a classic. Come see Custer’s horse!

http://www.fwmuseum.org/ 

The Cowgirl Hall of Fame is across the parking lot, and the Amon G. Carter Museum (mainly Western art), Kimble Museum (fine art, mummies), and Modern Art Museum are just across the street.   Across the intersection on the NE side of the Modern Art Museum, behind the post office, is a set of bent poles.  They aren’t modern art, per se, but are the remains of the old billboard that was there and got tore up and bent by the tornado that hit downtown in 2000.  Kinda cool, and I like to point it out to out of town guests.  It’s a neat reminder of how powerful the wind can be.  

Also, not natural history or science, but the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas is frikin’ awesome!  They trace the events that led up to the war in the Pacific back to the 1800s, and go up to the end of the war and into the Occupation.  It’s very detailed and information rich.  Plus, there are tanks, and aircraft, and submarines, and original newsreels, and interviews with survivors, and all kinds of stuff! 

http://www.pacificwarmuseum.org/index.asp 

Make sure you go when they are doing the live-action living history re-enactments, the flamethrower is intense!  

Oh, and most of the airports around here have flight museums.  The ones at Meechum and Addison (?) have old WWII planes you can book a flight in and the one at Love Field has an Apollo capsule.   

MIT Museum – some beautiful, truly amazing kinetic sculptures by Arthur Ganson reside here, as well as a gallery of school ‘hack’ pranks, and a rotating science-based exhibit. One memorable one was Harold Edgerton’s pioneering research in strobe-light photos and how he tailored it to capture everything from milkdrops and bullets-through-cards to capturing a nuclear detonation.

I loved it.  It was all the warnings my mother every gave me brought to life.  You blow off your fingers!  Yeah, but mom…they can just replace them with my toes!  Look at this guy leading a perfectly normal life now with his toethumb. 

I always wondered of his thumb smelled different than the rest of his hand. Would he be cheating at thumb wrestling?

The University of Alaska museum is actually pretty large now, though, having undergone a remodel and upgrade in 2006. And they see lots of tourist (lots of tourists in AK, after all). Not like museums in New York or D.C., but still pretty well attended and not just by locals.

They’ve had “Babe the Blue Ox” on display since the place was as big as a closet and I was shorter than the info placard.