Emily Whalen

English 4B

1/3/17
Extended Learning: Museum Experience

To fulfill the Museum option for Extended Learning, I am going to record my experience
about a museum that I visited in Tucson, Arizona during break. I went to the desert museum in
Tucson with my Aunt, Uncle, and two cousins who live out west, when my family flew out there
to be with them for Christmas. The museum contained many different exhibits all containing
different things. One exhibit was an outdoor exhibit and it had over one hundred species of
cactus that are all indigenous to the Sonoran Desert. The outdoor trail at the museum was a half
mine long, and it was a big loop in the desert environment showing all different kinds of wildlife
that can live in the climate and terrain. In the loop, there was a big fenced in outdoor space,
containing three coyotes from the Santa Rita and the Tucson Mountain ranges. In another area
outdoors, they had Javelina, a small, pig like animal that lives in the desert, and are very
commonly found in neighborhoods near the mountains, like my Uncles house. Indoors, the
museum had a very magnificent display of all the varieties of reptiles, spiders, snakes,
amphibians and insects that are indigenous to the desert. They had the actual creature and fossils
and remains of past homes formed by these creatures. They kept the scorpions behind glass
barriers cut out of big rocks in small crevices where it would show some similar environments as
to where it could be located in the desert. To be specific, some of the animals I saw would be the
Zebra Tail lizard, Western Whiptail Lizard, and the Sonoran Green Toad, which can only be
found in the Sonoran Desert. An insect that I accidentally encountered would be what I later
found out is called the Tarantula Wasp/Hawk. It is rated as a #2 sting on the insect sting pain
scale in the insect kingdom. Only found in the Sonoran desert, it flew a few inches from my
body. Luckily I did not get stung, but it was just another thing I learned at the museum. The
Museum had rock samples of all the different kinds of rock found in Tucson, and the minerals
that can be found in the rock too. Unlike New York and the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains,
The Mountains in Tucson and all the mountains out West are formed from Sedimentary rock, not
Metamorphic. The museum showed examples of these, and they showed how you can only find
the mineral Turquoise, a byproduct of copper, in the desert. I really enjoyed the trip to Tucson
and visiting the desert museum because I have never been that far west before, and I found it
fascinating, the amount of wildlife and plant species the desert and mountains can hold and how
different the terrain can be, with whole different mineral compositions and terrain.