Two animals I saw in a Nature Center
Here's a Spiny Softshell Turtle from the Quarry Hill Nature Center:
Absolutely the most phallic and the most fishlike turtle I've seen in my life. I love that snorkel nose.
Here's a catfish. I measured it with my Nevada Native Plant Society plant ruler. You could, if you wanted, color-correct my photo of the catfish to match the swatches on my ruler.
The catfish is alive. It's just floating around in a tank of water so clear, behind glass so unscratched and clean, that it looks kind of like it is dead and on display in a giant brick of resin, or something. The tank it was in was fucking incredible - it had passages underneath it for kids to wriggle through, so they could see the fish from below. It was in a room full of plastic sculptures of fish and plants and rocks and logs. There were a truly preposterous number of animal enclosures here, and tons of reptiles and amphibians. There was a fake cave and a wall covered in stuff about prehistoric single-celled organism fossils. I walked around a corner at one point and was jumpscared by an entire T-Rex skull sitting alone in a corner, like they had nowhere else to put it. Great stuff!!
The QHNC, like many places in Rochester, is insanely nice and extremely funded by the Mayo Clinic. I spent a lot of time wandering around in the "subway" tunnels below the Mayo this week, so I'll have more to write about that later. I do appreciate that the Mayo helped to make such a nice little nature center here, though!! It was a really fantastic little spot. I loved being able to get so close to such weird, unlovely aquatic guys.
Growing up, the closest science museum to my house was the Children's Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, which was home to this giant whale statue. A few years ago, "Conny the whale" was cut up and disassembled. The tail of the whale was preserved and installed across the street. I have strong but mixed-up and confused memories of wandering around in that children's museum. You could get lost in a bunch of possibly-accurate? possibly-effective?? science demonstrations - all dirty and worn, covered in kid-stained carpet. I would usually wander around there for an hour until the museum spat me out in its final room, which I remember being the Computer Room. At a certain point in my childhood, I started to beeline through the installations and dark rooms full of fog and lights and weird prisms and shit and just go straight to the room full of videogames. I remember there being Oregon Trail in there... and six or seven different computers with reskinned variations of the same "who eats who??" game on them.
I don't think about that museum often, but it definitely had a huge impact on my career and my interests. (Sadly, the museum has no current physical location after a flood destroyed its main location last year.) It's difficult to not be moved by a giant building full of weird sculptures and "educational" tunnels and twisty passages you could crawl through on your belly, and giant whales, and gross little animals in tanks. This is the type of entertainment I am least able to recapture for myself as an adult - partially because these places are built for small people, and I am now too large to fit inside them.