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Quick San Antonio travel review

I will patently deny having an alcohol problem, but I will admit to being addicted to buying things with jackalopes on them.

Let me tell you about San Antonio: go to the Buckhorn Saloon & Museum. It has a disturbing amount of taxidermy. Highlights include:

`a mountain gorilla which was the first displayed in North America

`an elephant shot by bow and arrow

`more than one deer with pathologies of the antlers, including one with a third central antler (!!!)


`a Fiji mermaid

`...only one jackalope

The Witte Museum is the natural history museum of San Antonio. I saw two of the permanent and one of the temporary exhibits.

`The permanent paleontology room has a Triceratops (...Triceratops is not known from Texas), a map of the geology of Texas that claims western Texas has no Cenozoic fossils (...I've seen a few thousand), and a lot of signage problems in properly using Linnean binomial nomenclature.

`The permanent zoology of Texas rooms were great. Texas has a lot of biomes and this part of the museum was done pretty well.


`The temporary aliens and androids exhibit was ... Obviously someone(s) had some money to put together an exhibit that would try to hit as many topics as possible (space! robots! extremophiles! microbes living on people!) with as little cohesion as possible. Their exhibit budget was spent on buying replicas of movie props, so the xenomorph from Alien was on display, next to some displays about "alien" microbes living on people. This is not a well-made exhibit, which is disappointing because it actually has meteorites from Mars and the moon (!!!)... that it saves until the end and places directly across from a room where the kids can play with fun things. Because apparently meteorites are not fun. :(

Is San Antonio worth your tourist dollars: Do you like Texas history? If yes, then sure. If not then ... hmm.

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