The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is home to a coral reef, a four-story bubble that encapsulates a replica of a rain forest, and perhaps most famously, Claude the albino alligator. But beneath all that–literally–is a basement chock-full of animal specimens collected from the field by intrepid scientists, tray after tray and jar after jar of insects, fish, mammals, and all kinds of other critters.
Even if we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic and the museum wasn’t temporarily closed, those collections would be closed to your average visitor. But hey, your kids in particular could use an hour of educational entertainment, so I reached out to the academy to see if they might show us around the stacks. Last week, we livestreamed the first in a series of chats with their scientists, which you can check out above.