Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is the home to one of the ten largest museums of natural history on the planet, the California Academy of Sciences . Since the building was remodeled two years ago, it may be thought of as one of the newest natural history museums in the United States, while at the same time retaining its origins in 1853, where it began as a society that carried out original research. The academy included education and exhibits as a major endeavor in the 20th Century, and its primary buildings reopened to the public in 2008.
This new California Academy of Sciences is in a single building which includes an aquarium, a natural history museum, and a four-story rainforest. It’s packed with hundreds of exhibits and contains thousands of animals. For travelers to San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences promises to be an engaging experience.
The Steinhart Aquarium contains 38,000 live animals which represent over 900 distinct species. You’ll find here sharks and stingrays, as well as African penguins (observable from a web cam at the museum’s website), and some spectacular exhibits: The Phillipne Coral Reef is contained at a depth of 25 feet in a tank that holds 212,000 gallons of water. The reef exhibit includes soft and hard corals, blacktip reef sharks, and over 2,000 reef fish. The aquarium also contains an albino alligator, African penguins, and a giant Pacific octopus.
In the Kimball Natural History Museum, you’ll see explorations of the evolution of life on Earth, with exhibits drawn from a 150-plus years of research and 20 million specimens, plus such features as the African Hall, which provides diaoramas first constructed in 1934, recalling the museum’s origins; the Islands of Evolution, an exhibit which explores the islands of Madagascar and the Galapagos; and a Foucault Pendulum, which proves and measures the rotation of the Earth.
Finally, visitors may also experience a four-story rainforest, placed inside a 90 foot diameter glass dome. This is the largest exhibit of its kind in the world, and you’ll be able to walk through it on a spiraling path, and know what it’s like to be in an actual rainforest, where temperatures are maintained at 82-85 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity is kept at seventy-five percent! You’ll be inside a dome with 1,600 live animals, including flying birds, butterflies, exotic reptiles and amphibians and a cave filled with bats. After that experience, you may be more than happy to find your way back to an air-conditioned room, relaxing in one of the five star hotels in San Francisco .
Related posts: