Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences

I had off for President's Day, so we decided to go to a museum that we had nevr been to before and had my dad (Pap to Zoe) come along with us. It is located in center city Philly diagonally across the street from the Franklin Institute. It was difficult to walk past that one since they apparently have a cool "The Tech of Star Wars" exhibit there right now and cool 2 story high banners with the Death Star, TIE and X Wings on it and Darth's helmut in the stairs (the part that you don't walk on), so it had a cool optical illusion look to it. But Zoe is a little young (YET) for that so we moved on.

The Academy was pretty cool. It turned out to be bigger than it looked from the outside with exhibits on 4 levels. At first I was a little leary since the first section we visited was animal diaramas with stuffed moose, tigers, etc. and Dad and I joked that it looked like the Zoo of the Future ala Soylent Green. This is what animals used to look like!

As we discovered the museum, Zoe loved the life-size T-Rex and other dino skeletons as she loved this picture book (with no text) about a bird that visits a dino museum and imagined the dinos coming to life. There was also a butterfly room that you could walk through that was really cool. A few of the big ones were bigger than some birds. All in all, a good day and the almost 6o degree temp made for a nice, albeit weird feeling day to be walking around in un-typical Feb weather.

The Acadeny of Natural Science's Website
http://www.ansp.org