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Expansive riverside location offers smorgasbord of new hands-on experiences.
by Minjung Kim
Remember your fascination with the massive jaws of the Triceratops skeleton during your first field trip to a science museum as a child? The new Science Museum of Minnesota provides such an awe-inspiring experience, no matter what your age.
Set amid 10 acres of park land on the riverfront in downtown St. Paul, the 93-year-old museum's new $100 million facility is home to nearly two million artifacts. With eight acres and five levels of exhibits, impressive vistas, dazzling visual theater, and more than double the museum's previous space, it offers a pleasing mix of the old museum standbys along with new displays.
Out front, Iggy the railroad-tie iguana greets visitors to the educational entrance. In the lobby, a giant cast of the 80-million-year-old flying reptile Quetzalocoatlus dangles from the ceiling.
Your first stop may be the museum's new convertible dome IMAX Omnitheater, the first of its kind in the U.S. It's a huge theater with the seating capacity of a 747 jet. The front is a conventional flat movie screen seven stories tall and nine stories wide. The 89-foot retractable dome screen - almost nine stories side to side - is controlled by two massive arms, each holding an 11-ton counterweight. The dome can be moved over your head to cover the flat screen in five minutes. The current feature, The Great Migrations, is stunning.
A 3-D laser show in the theatre provides another visual spectacle. While watching the 15-minute show, The Illuminated Brain, in the 331-seat auditorium with special sunglasses, you feel like objects on the screen appearing to be floating right in front of your nose.
The Human Body Gallery provides plenty of hands-on activities. As you follow the stair to the level four, the first thing that draws your attention is the Bloodstream Superhighway, an area of the exhibit encircled by a 100-foot-long tube filled with a flowing blood-like fluid. Some visitors wait in line to feel the pulse on the tube, while others simply watch the pumping mechanism. At every turn, you find hands-on activities that engage the senses.
"What's in a sneeze?" is one example, where a szfizz!, a fine spray of water, shot out at people who trip the mechanism.
The Collections Gallery displays the museum's famous Egyptian mummy, along with a traditional Hmong house and a Douglas fir trunk that is seven feet in diameter.
The Dinosaurs and Fossils Gallery houses skeletons of an 82-foot-long Diplodocus, one of the largest creatures to roam the earth, a 14-foot-long Xiphactinus (a fierce, fanged fish that lived 70 million years ago in a vast sea that stretched across what is today North America) and a Triceratops. Here you can operate a giant set of T. rex jaws, recreating the dinasaur's giant-sized bite.
In the Mississippi River Gallery you can navigate a boat down the Mississippi via simulation, enter a real towboat, weigh replicas of Minnesota fish, and gaze at the hanging fish sculpture made from junk culled from the river.
If you want to kick back for a while, have a seat in the gallery's Perception Theater. A 15-minute program shows the tricks your mind can play using illusions and magic. You can even put on lab coats, goggles, and gloves and analyze extracted wheat germ DNA at the Cell Lab. If you want to test more hands-on exhibits, stop by at the Experiment Gallery on the level two. You can create your own weather system; test sound and wonder at its complexity in the Sound Lab; watch a tornado form from a rolling cloud; and visit the Wave Tank and watch the surf crash against a wall or roll slowly up onto shore. You can also see more than two million artifacts and fossils, many of which were previously in storage for lack of exhibit space.
The museum is user-friendly. There are three eateries, plenty of benches and 15 restrooms - including one pair that mimics a giant sewage pipe. Outdoor spaces will be used to study the river and ecology as weather allows. When the outdoor park and learning areas are completed this summer, you can bike or walk along the river.
The new Science Museum of Minnesota differs from some contemporary museums that force visitors to follow a fixed sequence and forgoes the dark halls of traditional natural history museums. Here, you go to explore. And the natural light and stunning views of the river from massive windows will enhance your experience.
@ FOR MORE INFORMATION see www.smm.org.
