I went in blind for our visit at the Canadian Museum of Nature. Figuratively, that is. I’d never been there and did zero research in advance, other than knowing they had a pretty cool dinosaur collection in their Fossil Gallery. Then there were the live sea creatures and the skeleton of a blue whale in the Water Gallery; terrifying insects and arachnids (even when it’s under glass, I get the willies being anywhere near a tarantula) in the Bugs Alive Gallery; strikingly realistic and life-size displays in the Mammals Gallery; an amazing collection of meteorites in the Earth Gallery; the Canada Goose Arctic Gallery, which included a wonderful education of the importance of beluga whales to the Inuit of the Western Arctic. We somehow missed the Bird Gallery, featuring the largest collection of Canadian birds on display in the world—more than 450 species!

There were elder couples, young families and everyone in between—all mesmerized by the seven-metre-wide inflated sculpture of  planet Earth  by artist Luke Jerram, which hung from atop the museum’s ceiling.

Here’s a quick video of our experience.