we’re at the new natural history museum at the university of Minnesota and ngl lads i cried a little
I used to work for the Botany Dept at the Smithsonian and the impression I got was that it was difficult to get the Powers That Be to display botanical collections and botanical research anything like the way they display zoology, geology, etc… This though, this is beautifully designed and executed.
hey i posted this but don’t think i said the actual location, this is the bell museum of natural history in saint paul, minnesota (2088 Larpenteur Ave)! they’ve been open for literally two weeks in their new location and god man it’s so cool…their ‘touch and see’ education room features an installation where they have a structure with all sorts of plants growing on a transparent tray/on top of and on the sides of the structure, and the kiddos can go in this padded area under it and look at the root structures underneath….they also have preserved shelf fungi to touch and all that is presented right along side the animals and stuff like the museums i went to on field trips as a small child had no botanical education exhibits like this man like i’m so shook:
oh and lets not forget the searchable herbarium and specimen collection station
oh, and they have a planetarium, a section on evolution, a mammoth room, all the stunning dioramas that they had moved from the old location, a section on astonomy/how scientists find new planets, an interactive exhibit on global warming and the greenhouse effect that has you stand in front of an infrared camera, a pollinator garden, and exhibits about the native Dakota Indian tribe, including this at the enterence:
this really made me think, because at the natural history museum i was brought to on class field trips as a kid, all the exhibits mentioning native peoples talked about them in the past tense; it was and still is an old museum, and i’ve heard that they’ve now lost even more funding and are now operating on a dangerously low budget (iowa is a red state, so the university-associated natural history museums and programs- wherever they occur- are easily slashed). in fact, part of how this whole museum blew me away was how new it was; this was the first time in my life i’d seen an instance of a non-smithsonian natural history museum being given proper funding and attention to update everything. really something else, like holy shit.
vanhalenofficial 