Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum

The Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum is on the campus of Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, UT. I studied at BYU for my masters in geology, and made a few visits with my family to this museum. I don't have particularly good pictures of the place, unfortunately, as I always had my kids with me. I was usually trying to take pictures of them as they refused to stay still in the often dim light. But the museum itself is very nice. Aside from all of the animal displays you would expect, there is a good play area for kids. Museum employees regularly have demonstrations of things like furs or live animals, and there's a theater that is used for various shows for kids. The museum is fairly new, an upgrade from a much smaller former location. Some of the exhibits have been under construction during my visits. But the museum overall is large, nicely organized, and good for all age groups. The website for the museum is https://mlbean.byu.edu/.

Naturally, the first place I write about in my "brown sign" blog is a place for which I've never seen a brown sign. Still, it's the kind of place I like to stop off and visit. The pictures from this post are only from a single visit in January of 2018. The kids liked the play area enough that we didn't make it to very many parts of the museum on this trip. I'll probably edit this post to include more pictures later.

Museum Location:

From the North American section. Some work was still being done in the background. 

My son feeling some snake skin from an employee's demonstration. 

There was a special exhibit based on a recent discovery of an old-timey giant snake. Richard was quite pleased.

My daughter quite enjoyed the birds, of which there were many.

Elephant, because reasons.

My kids were surprisingly unimpressed with the fish displays.

The kids' play area had a slide, this cave, and a couple other things. They recently added a bear inside of the cave.

Here Richard is using a flashlight to discover the bear inside of the cave. He wasn't sure if it was fun or really, really scary. He ended up liking it.

Half of our museum trip seemed to be spent on this one ant display. The ants are magnets, and you can use magnet wands to move them around. The kids no longer wanted to watch animal shows or see other exhibits once they found this next to the play area. This is why there aren't pictures of the many, many other good exhibits.