One magical Saturday each year, in spring, the universities of California have an open house day when the public can tour the campuses. It just so happens that the UC Berkeley campus houses The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Home to thousands of preserved specimens, field notes and photos.

We were so there.

Now I’ve seen my fair share of natural history displays but mostly in museums settings. Where they’d been carefully curated, stuffed, articulated and placed in a diorama. This was a working collection. These specimens were displayed in the same way they are stored. So instead of animals displayed in a life-like situations it was more a combination of biological groupings. It gave the whole affair a high-level science fair meets biology lab sort of feel.

It was pretty fantastic.

Berkeley Campus

Biochemistry Building

Museum of Paleontology

I guess Freud wasn't alone in his love of round glasses and pointy beards.

Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

They have a seemingly endless collection of specimens of mammals and birds..

...amphibians and reptiles.

They had a few class rooms set up with live animals and other displays.

By the hastily hand-lettered note on a paper towel...

...one can only assume there was an earlier incident involving the less than live bunnies on display in front

I guess you never out grow the science fair, even as a post-graduate candidate studying vertebrate zoology

Good penmanship creates and inadvertent aesthetic

California icons: a killer grizzly and condor...

.. bear and black deer

Until I saw a stuffed one, I had no idea that the Albatross was so enormous. I'm not even kidding. It was the size of a small pony.

We also checked out the Jepson Herbaria

I'm pretty sure if this was 1915 that coconut would have a skirt.