Organization

• Tell-a-friend
• Add to My Favorites

May Museum of Natural History

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. It is extremely hard to describe this exhibition to anyone who has not seen it. The average person has no idea that there are such giant insects and related creatures in the tropics of the world. If you think tropical flowers have vivid colors, then you should see these invertebrates which display every known color. Some of the huge Brazilian butterflies have iridescent shades that reflect the sunlight and make them visible for half a mile. Over the years there have been hundreds of school and college classes that have come to see this Museum and the students are impressed with the many really astonishing forms of camouflage these creatures employ for their own protection. Imagine a stick insect from New Guinea which measures 17 inches long and looks so much like a bundle of sticks that it is invisible unless it moves - the 10 inch wide Actius Moths of India that imitate the Cobra Snake to scare off their enemies - the leaf Insects of Borneo and the leaf Butterfly of Madagascar that are exactly like the leaves of the trees they rest on. Almost everyone is curious about the invertebrates that can harm them and there are many of the most poisonous on display. One of these is the 9 inch scorpion of the Congo in Africa. There are many other kinds capable of poisoning and even killing some people. The very large purple Tarantula spiders of Peru are on display. They are the world's largest spiders and can actually catch and kill mice and small birds.