Museum Takes New Look at Air, Water, Land and Life

By: Sue Manning, Associated Press Writer LOS ANGELES (AP).- Watch maggots munch on liver. Stand in the path of a flash flood. Roam around a kelp forest. Nearly 10 years in the making, the $165 million Ecosystems Experience opens Thursday with its one-of-a-kind view of the world at the California Science Center. And it's free. Plants, animals and do-it-yourself science take up nearly every inch of the two-story, 45,000-square-foot exhibit in Exposition Park, south of downtown. Temperatures, lighting and learning change in the 11 environments on display in this combination aquarium, zoo, school and arcade. The highlight is a 24-foot-long transparent tunnel through a 188,000-gallon tank that puts you face to face with 1,500 horn sharks, swell sharks, giant sea bass, wolf eels, bat rays and other fish swimming in a kelp forest. Most people know kelp as the "slimy stuff covered with flies that piles up on beaches,"
Read more...