The University of Louisiana at Lafayette science museum is a large space full of artifacts and information galore. It is free to UL Lafayette students if they show their student ID, and it is located only 10 minutes from campus.
Throughout the museum, there are multiple sections such as aquatics, weather, geology, paleontology, environment, space, entomology, game birds and waterfowl and more. Within these sections, there is information and exhibits on every wall and around every corner.
In the aquatics section, there is virtual aquatic technology in which visitors can tap on the glass and watch the virtual fish react. In the weather section, there is a tornado simulator, where visitors can watch as the machine creates what looks like a tornado.
The geology section contains fossils of many extinct animals such as American mastodons, Columbian mammoths, giant ground sloths and a megatylopus (giant camel).
There are also fossils that came directly from parts of Louisiana. From Jefferson Island there are horses, tapirs and mastodons. From Acadia Parish, there are mastodons and jaguars, and from Acadiana there’s turtles and bison. Lastly, from Avery Island there’s giant ground sloths, horses, mammoths and mastodons. While on the first level, visitors can find a wall dedicated to wood and minerals.
As visitors move up to the second floor of the museum, they enter into the voluminous space section. Along the walls there is information about rockets, astronauts and past astronomical events.
Models of rockets are displayed in cases. Some of these rockets include the Vostok Booster, Vostok Spacecraft, Mercury-Atlas, Juno-Explorer 1, Freedom 7, Friendship 7, Apollo Launch Stack, Gemini-Titan 2, Moon Race Boosters and many more.
Against another wall, replicas of carbon-carbon wing protection, high temperature black tiles, space shuttle heat shield, low temperature white tiles and many other parts of past spacecrafts are laid out.
As visitors walk towards the end of the space section, there is a moon globe, a signed Acadiana flag that was flown aboard a space shuttle in the 1990s and many space patches lining the walls. Once they reach the back wall, there is a planetarium that has showings multiple times each day.
Sydni Skidmore, a sophomore secondary education major, says, “My favorite part is probably the space exhibit they have upstairs and the films you could watch, I think those are really fun.”
Within the entomology section, there are fossils of tetrapods, butterflies, bees, wasps and dragonflies along with live cockroaches, beetles and spiders. There is also a large display showing a European hornets’ nest.
In between the entomology section and game birds and waterfowl section, there is an interesting corner that shows the bones of certain vertebrate animals.
Some of the animals in this corner are a raccoon, a common domestic mouse, tree squirrel, bobcat, beaver, fox, deer, old world pig, dolphin, American alligator, alligator snapping turtle, mallard duck and American white pelican.
The game birds and waterfowl section contains animals like the ring-necked pheasant, canvasback duck, sage grouse, northern eider, northern shoveler duck and many others.
Throughout the museum, fossils from various dinosaurs are also set up.
Some of the dinosaurs that a visitor might see are a Torvosaurus, saurophaganax, stegosaurus, albertosaurus, allosaurus, utahraptor and a herrerasaurus.
As guests finish and leave, they can pass by the gift shop and pick up some UL science museum merchandise.