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Ok, so you know how Disneyland is the happiest place on earth right?

Imagine you hate their consumerism. You hate Disney for all the lies about animals and how you thought lemmings were suicidal for most of your life. The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is the Biologist’s Disneyland (Hire me @heycalacademy please). You’re a biologist, a naturalist, a scientist, a wonderer. 3 floors of the natural world PLUS a basement all in one roof! Top story? An open roof ceiling. Benches to sit on. A garden with native plants. Unfortunately you can’t sit in it, but you can observe from a platform. The pollinators, the birds. Ugh. So beautiful. 

Second floor wraps around the central room like cathedral seats. A place to worship nature. There is an education and interp room, with a small library, a nature documentary that runs, usually about marine mammals, a polar bear skin, skulls and taxidermy figurines of different birds. A mineral collection sits in the hallway, while through another room you can find a natural history of dinosaurs rahr. 

The bottom floor…oh gods. You got the stereotypical gift shop, a cafeteria (A bit expensive, but hey man, it’s SF, also much tastier and cheaper compared to say Disneyland), not one, but TWO bathrooms. A room/hall full of Taxidermy exhibits, and a short display about the beginning of mankind. At the end of the hall is a bunch of live African Penguins! The Cal Academy’s colony is part of a Species Survival Plan. Basically these penguins on exhibit, which you can see on their Penguin Cams Here, are given the perfect habitat to reproduce and will hopefully be released back into the wild in the future. The museum’s scientific collections are also on this floor. You can see them on the behind the scenes tour for a small extra price ontop of admission but if you’re poor, you can also see a bit of the drawers from an outside glass window. You can also stare in the window at scientists working, like a human exhibit! Just don’t tap on the glass. My favorite part is watching the curators clean and stuffing study skins. It’s something I’m knowledgeable about, so when a kid walks up to stare at me quizzically wondering why I’m staring at this poor woman trying to carefully stuff a hummingbird, I just go off about the process. UGH. I would love to give a workshop on making study skins. 

Handsome boi Clyde is an albino alligator who lives on the first/basement floors of the museum. You can look into his pit of an exhibit, or go downstairs. Some person made a Wikipedia article here. I love whoever made this.

You’ve also got the jungle. A three-story, curling rain forest exhibit. Stuffed with freshwater-fishes, two blue-and-gold macaws, butterflies, finches, and mini exhibits with arthropods, reptiles, and amphibians. You get to sit in an indoor greenhouse! How amazing is that. Finally, on the top floor, you get to the elevators that you take three floors down to the basement. 

Finally the basement takes you under the sea. An aquarium with multiple fishy exhibits, a tank of moon jellies, a touch tank with some badass volunteers who talk about the animals, an exhibit on deep water and for some reason, more herps and arthropods, why not? It’s weird, but I love it. The place where the swamp of freshwater meets the sea. Similar to the marshes where I go to school now. Feels almost homey. The downstairs is cool, being the same amount of air conditioned but being lower underground, it feels cooler. It also has a cute gift shop you can visit. Tbh I love just sitting down there sketching the animals. I wish there were more benches down there for me to sit and sketch. 

Mule deer / CAS:MAM:26565 and CAS:MAM:26566