Museum of Arts & Sciences

ABOUT THIS PLACE

It started in 1954 as a committee to found a children's museum, was incorporated the following year, and took its present name in 1961. The campus sits on the ninety-acre Tuscawilla Preserve, and the museum also runs Gamble Place, a separate 175-acre property. The fossil gallery holds the most complete giant ground sloth skeleton found in North America, dug out of the ground not far from here. The Cuban gallery is the largest permanent display of Cuban art outside Cuba. The Root Family collection came from Chapman Root, whose family business made the contoured Coca-Cola bottle, and it includes private rail cars, race cars and about 2,490 pieces of Coca-Cola material, one of the largest such collections anywhere. The planetarium opened on October 11, 1972, was rebuilt in 2014 with digital projection, and was named the Lowell and Nancy Lohman Planetarium in 2021. The Children's Museum opened on November 21, 2008, in a nine-thousand-square-foot building of hands-on science exhibits. For a city better known for racing and beach, this is a serious collection