Miami’s Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science

For years-and-years, Miami has been waiting for a museum to take them away to a galaxy far-far-away, or earthly ecosystems coming to life in front of their eyes. Now with Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum, people of all ages can explore their interest. With years of repeated delay, construction, and funding shortfalls, the four-building, 250,000-sq-ft museum hit Miami’s Biscayne Bay offering family fun, science, educational activities, and nature.

The Miami museum was first envisaged about 20 years ago and it’s replaced the much smaller facility that had been receiving visitors in Coconut Grove, south of downtown, since 1960. Exhibits include a free-flight aviary and a look at a live coral collection. Others parts of the museum will feature the science behind the solar system, the physics of lasers, and the history and execution of flight, from the earliest flying reptiles to space exploration and the modern airplane.

On the first floor of the museum, kids will be able to jump around the luminous dance floor. The dance floor teaches visitors about how their body works, dieting, and the orange, yellow, neon lights, make it all fun for every age.

Fish, like fall leaves, vibrant and thin. Their scales like the most delicate of armor plating make their way through the massive tank. A small child has his eyes fixed on the bright yellow fish. Its fins resemble more of a wingspan of a dragon the way it glides through the water. Its teeth aren’t a stranger to flesh and blood. Much like the fish, the child’s eyes bulge when a 7-foot shark swoops by above his head.

"Stop, Hammer Time" - A picture of a Hammerhead Shark (Pictures By: Nile Fortner)

One of the key features and highlights of Frost is the museum’s 100-ft-wide, 500,000-gallon, saltwater aquarium. This aquarium features creatures of the ocean through a 60,000-pound oculus. Some of the creatures include,

· Hammerhead Sharks

· Tiger Sharks

· Devil Rays

· Mahi Mahi Fish

In the "Feathers to the Stars" exhibit part of the museum, shows an assortment of dinosaurs, including a 30-foot-long feathered yutyrannus — an ancestor of the famed Tyrannosaurus rex. They also offer a look at human flight, animal flight such as birds, and space exploitation.

It’s like a black blanket contrasting with darkness and yellows, and the occasional white that has stars looking like spilt sugar on black marble. There are stars which dot the black blanket in an intricate pattern. This is space. A 250-seat planetarium, its imposing orb visible to passers-by on Biscayne Boulevard, will treat visitors to what the museum calls “a dazzling visual journey” to outer space, the ocean depths or inside the human body on a huge domed screen that is tilted forward at 23.5 degrees so that images move across a viewer’s entire field of vision. For example, the film ‘Asteroid: Mission Extreme’ makes you feel like you're on a rocket ship journeying through space.