Cal Academy

Started: 2025-12-03 19:20:16

Submitted: 2025-12-03 20:56:20

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Natural history and animatronic dinosaurs in Golden Gate Park

On Labor Day we went to see the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Rather than try to drive up 19th Ave we took BART to Glen Park, picked up food for lunch at Canyon Market, and caught the 44 MUNI bus up past Glen Canyon and down the other side, through the Inner Sunset and into Golden Gate Park.

Upon entering the museum it wasn't obvious what we ought to see first, or even what the most interesting exhibits were. We looked through displays of rocks and minerals (the museum began life as a natural history museum, and still maintains a large archive) and ended up on the building's living roof, carefully planted with native grasses to look natural.

The observation deck gave us an expansive view of this part of Golden Gate Park, including the de Young Museum across the Music Concourse.

We wondered about the structure of the roof until I found the sign explaining the careful construction of the roof, including layers of waterproofing, attention to drainage, and low-density soil intended to reduce the load on the roof. The roof wrapped around the twin domes covering the rainforest and planetarium, looking like hills except for the large round windows in the dome above the rainforest.

We walked through an exhibit on the mezzanine about the deep ocean, which was mostly new interpretive displays with a couple of old artifacts preserved in jars (which was what I found most interesting).

On the ground floor we walked through an exhibit focused on California and saw the taxidermied remains of Monarch, the last grizzly bear known to be alive in the state of California, who may be the bear depicted on the modern version of the state flag.

Monarch was displayed in a darkened glass case, which was probably great for for preservation, but the bright and airy ground floor of the museum provided a significant amount of glare on the glass, making it difficult to see Monarch, and nearly impossible to photograph. Monarch was positioned to look straight out the case into the museum, so I could stand right in front; but I decided to take advantage of the glare and get a photo depicting both me and Monarch. The bear's face is visible only where my silhouette blocks the light from the rest of the museum; the bear observes the bustle of the museum on a holiday afternoon while remaining physically separated from it.

Around the corner from Monarch was a small gallery showing artifacts of California wildlife from the museum's archives. This room was darkened, making it easier to see into the glass display cases. One of the first things I saw was the skeleton, and the taxidermied remains, of two brown pelicans. When I go to the beach I see flocks of brown pelicans, flying gracefully in spite of their size. They soar in formation, their fat bellies inches above the water; then they pull up a few more inches so they have enough clearance to flap their wings, then resume soaring. To fish they climb twenty feet above the water, then dive, tucking in their wings an instant before they hit the water.

The artifacts gallery also had a saber-tooth cat skeleton, the state fossil, from the La Brea Tar Pits.

Our next stop was the rainforest exhibit, enclosed in a glass dome standing in the middle of the museum, raising all the way up to the bulge in the roof above.

Inside the dome the air was warm and humid. Trees and vines and aerial roots encroached on the concrete walkways leading through the exhibit. The plants gave the impression of barely-constrained chaos, though the whole exhibit had been created from scratch when the museum was rebuilt after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

We climbed a spiral ramp into the dome. (I'm going to call it a "spiral ramp" because that's the commonly-understood word, even though it's shaped as a helix.) On a mezzanine half-way up the dome there were a set of individual terrariums showing different animals living in rainforests.

Butterflies fluttered about and landed on plates with cut fruit set out for them to snack on. A mural on the concrete elevator shaft at the center of the dome gave the impression of the forest stretching out into the distance. As we climbed higher into the canopy we saw more plants growing on the trees high above the ground. Some of the plants looked like some of my houseplants; I think I see a split-leaf philodendron.

From the top of the dome we boarded an elevator to exit the exhibit, which took us down to the aquarium in the basement, through a quarantine room to catch any butterflies that might have tried to hitch a ride while we weren't watching. We stepped out into a large underwater viewing tube, covering an entire walkway, under the pool in the middle of the rainforest dome. From above we could look down and see people in the tube under the water, and from below we could look up and see the light coming in from above.

Through the walls of the viewing tube we could see the tropical fish swimming about under the rainforest dome, including large catfish. It's not obvious from this picture but this catfish is almost a meter long.

We looked through the aquarium, which was a confusing maze of darkened corridors with different fish representing different habitats, punctuated by the occasional loud child echoing off all of the flat surfaces. One section representing the deep ocean was so dark they didn't want us taking any pictures, even with the flash off, either because they didn't trust us to actually turn off the flash or because the light from the autofocus might throw off the light-sensitive creatures in the tanks.

We emerged above ground to see Claude the albino alligator sitting in his habitat. Signs around the railing proclaimed September to be his "30th hatch-day" with festivities scheduled throughout the month to celebrate. A sign in the corner indicated that Claude was being sponsored by Anthropic on account of their LLM chatbot also being named Claude. Claude the alligator did not seem especially excited by the attention; he lounged on the ground without obviously moving as far as I could tell.

(Three months after our visit, (yesterday as I'm writing this), Claude died at the age of 30. Today we learned that his necropsy, conducted at UC Davis, indicated that he had liver cancer.)

By this time it was late afternoon and the museum would be closing soon, which gave us just enough time to look at the manta rays swimming in the pool in front of the planetarium, then head outside to the Dino Days exhibit, featuring animatronic dinosaurs under the cypress trees flanking the museum.

I couldn't help but hum the theme to Jurassic Park to myself as I walked between the dinosaurs waving their arms around and gesticulating at the snack-sized people below.

We left the museum as it was closing and walked to the botanical garden around the corner, which was open late for the end of the summer. Calvin and Julian were not especially interested in walking around the gardens, so they stayed behind while Kiesa and I looked around. We saw plants from California, and other similar climates; a grove of redwood trees; and numerous other plants on our brief walk through the gardens. It was late in the afternoon and there were very few people around. (I might have seen more geese on the lawn than people.)

We got burritos for supper across the street from the park, then caught the 44 MUNI bus back to Glen Park and drove the rest of the way home from Daly City, after seeing natural history and animatronic dinosaurs in Golden Gate Park.