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May Natural History Museum

The May Natural History Museum of the Tropics, located southwest of Colorado Springs, is a unique museum - there is not another like it on the continent. Beginning in 1929, John M. May and his late father, James F. W. May, started exhibiting their Tropical display at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, Canada, and at Flower Shows and Sports Shows in many large American cities. These showings were so popular and won the Mays so much attention that they have continued them right up to the present. Over the past sixty-five years they have put on their exhibitions in almost every U.S. state and every province of Canada. Fifty-seven years ago the May family came to Colorado Springs and made this their headquarters. In the 1940's John May built a permanent Museum and headquarters building on their ranch nine miles southwest of Colorado Springs and one mile west of Highway 115. It is near Fort Carson and today a replica of the Hercules Beetle of the West lndies marks the turnoff to the Museum. Over all these years this fabulous exhibition has been improved and enlarged. Even though the main collection contains over one hundred thousand invertebrates, about 8,000 are all that are shown to the general public because this is all a person can look at in one visit - even then some people spend two or three hours and return many times to see what they missed on previous visits. Generally speaking, the largest, the most beautiful and the most valuable are the ones on display; exhibits are changed from year to year.