Missouri: Springfield: WOW Aquarium and Wildlife Museum, Part 2

WOW Wildlife Museum, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

December 2017


I covered the WOW Aquarium in Part 1 here.

Today it's about the Wildlife Museum.

It reminds me a bit of the Chicago Field Museum, which my mother and I visited some years ago during a burning-cold winter weekend, which you can read about here. The similarity of the two institutions is the catalog-like collection of living creatures, now dead, stuffed, and preserved for our observation. Not a bad thing, just a little disconcerting at times. Like being on a massive space ship, aimed for a new planetary home, taking with us a unique library of what was on Earth.

The WOW Wildlife Museum, like the Chicago Field Museum, also has exhibits depicting the clothing and arts of native peoples of North America. And paintings of historic America.

Chicago Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois. December 2009.

There are moments of awe in some of the WOW rooms, in which the awe is a consequence of an astonishing quantity of one thing. Like the room of mounted deer heads and the arch of antlers. Or the room of mountain sheep. 

There's a gasp-inducing exhibit of a world-record sized polar bear.

WOW Wildlife Museum, Springfield, Missouri. December 2017.

When I walked through the Wildlife Museum, I'd already spent so much of my mental and sensory energy on the Aquarium that I couldn't give the Wildlife Museum its due.

That was a shame.