Milwaukee Public Museum

Hello my patient readers,
Sorry it's been so long since I last posted. I've just been crazy busy with everything, but now is definitely the time to write something.

A few weeks ago, myself and a few members of Club Insecta (and a couple other random people who wanted to come with) went to the Milwaukee Public Museum. I was the only person who had been there previously, so I knew that they had a very nice insect collection and butterfly garden.

As we walked up the stairs, we were greeted with a fantastic site.

A whale skeleton, decked out for the holidays

To me, this is a fantastic way to start off the tour of the museum (though the last time I had been there, there hadn't been any lights on the whale). As you can just barely see at the top of the stairs, there are other interesting things up there as well.
Once you get to the top, there is a wonderful assortment of skeletons and taxidermied animals. There are some of the most bizarre creatures that they have in this collection. I wish it was better organized and my friend said I should work here to better organize everything (I am a bit OCD when it comes to symmetry and organization at times).

Just a handful of the animals. You can see birds in the case behind
 them, along with another very random assortment of things.

And while these things are interesting, this was Club Insecta I was with, so of course we are looking for the greatest insects we can find. I led them around to the back of this great opening display to show them a thing of disorganized beauty.

This was about a third of the entire box. There were so many amazing
specimens that had basically been randomly thrown into a box.

I am biased towards longhorn beetles. I find them fascinating,
so I couldn't pass up a shot of them.

Nice selection of Buprestids (though notice the one random Elaterid in the mix)

It was great to see these specimens, but we still had to see the butterfly house! That of course was our next stop. As we walked in, I just looked down and saw this little guy chilling on the rock right by the door. He was completely unperturbed by the people coming in.

There were butterflies flitting about everywhere! It was great to see so many different species all together in a peaceful place such as this. And as an added benefit by the museum, they played calming music as we walked through. They even had morphos laboriously floating through the air. As stunning as those were though, there was one specimen that caught my eye, not because it was big or brightly colored, but because it was green!

Such a cool little butterfly

 After some time, we were able to drag ourselves out of the magical butterfly room into the insect wing (yes, they have an insect wing). In a small room, they had many live specimens and a few more great looking pinned ones. My favorite thing in the room though was a terrarium that had two Damon diadema in it. Absolutely love those and am planning on getting one as a pet one day.

And showing another bias of mine, the giant Tanzanian tailless whip scorpion (Damon diadema)

A cool looking mantis. In a container right beside this, there
were many little mantises just like this.

Another great display of insects

Once exiting this room, there is one devoted entirely to butterflies and moths. There is display on display filled with many different beautiful species. It was great to see. There was even a video (with a song) about the butterfly life cycle depicted by puppets. It was somewhat disturbing to see, but quite educational for any kids that may come through. Despite all the butterflies and moths everywhere, there was a large mantis in the middle of the room, attacking a butterfly. This was rather odd, but made for a great photo opportunity for the club.

A few members of Club Insecta

One of the more colorful cases

Besides all the great insects that were being shown off, there were other unexplored places within the museum to see. This brought us to what was being shown as a research area. This was pretty cool because there was a huge display with so many different animals that depicted the tree of life.

The Tree of Life with my friend sitting at the control chair in the middle.
A rather frightening thought.

 From there, we moved on to some rooms showing the history of life, complete with fossils and dinosaurs. And right next to that is a whole ecosystem, the rain forest! It was very well done, but too dark for any good pictures. They had facts posted everywhere, so it was extremely informative.

After that, we realized we were running short on time, so we quickly moved through the other exhibits. They mostly depicted different indigenous people from different regions of the world. It was cool to see the tools they used and what sort of clothing they made because you could compare a group from Africa to a group from New Zealand or South America or India just by walking into another room. My camera had died by this point, so I'm sorry that I wasn't able to get any pictures of all this.

A fun thing about this museum is that it has a bunch of random little ecosystems scattered about to go with the indigenous people. They would give little bits of information about the habitat along with how people could survive it. And yet the last exhibit we saw was kind of secluded away from the rest. It was an ocean that had a small room dedicated to shells and a roundabout staircase to get you up to that room. The staircase had all these cool little portals to look through and see different sea creatures at different depths. It was cool to see, but time was of essence, so we had to move on so we could get out before the museum closed.

The Milwaukee Public Museum is an awesome place and I advise everyone to visit there at some point. It's a trip you won't forget if you're a buglover like me.

Bug