Staatliches Museum fur Naturkunde Stuttgart (or in English: State Museum for Natural History Stuttgart)

The State Museum of History in Stuttgart is broken down into two different museums. The Schloss Museum and the Museum am Lowentor. The Schloss Museum contains nothing but information and models of prehistoric animals. The Museum am Lowentor contains models and information on modern animals.

The Schloss Museum

When we first arrived at the Schloss Museum (name of dino museum) Shaelyn was greeted by three life size outdoor dinosaur models. She was in heaven. I have to admit that they were pretty cool myself.

Shaelyn enjoyed the inside of the dino museum also. Here are some of the pictures we took.

Wooly Mammoth

Real Wooly Mammoth Tusk

Wooly Mammoth Skeleton. It's much larger than it looks. It was so large that we had to be so far away from it for the whole skeleton to fit in the frame that the perspective was lost. I think you guys get the idea of how large it is though.

Prehistoric moose

Deinotherium ("terrible beast"), also called the Hoe tusker,[1] was a gigantic prehistoric relative of modern-day elephants that appeared in the Middle Miocene and continued until the Early Pleistocene. During that time it changed very little. In life it probably resembled modern elephants, except that its trunk was shorter, and it had downward curving tusks attached to the lower jaw.

For the life of me I can't remember what this thing is but is some sort of prehistoric fish. It was the most vicious of sea animals alive at it's time.

Mr. T-Rex please don't eat me!!

Museum am Lowentor

After we had finished visiting the Schloss Museum we ventured across the street to the Lowentor. Well, actually it was on the other side of the train tracks and we had to walk through the train yard. It was a little weird since the brochure stated that you could easily travel from museum to the other. I guess if you consider a 1 mile walk and a venture through the train yard easy then, yes, it was an easy walk from one museum to the other. Enough my frustrating long walk in the rain with a 6 year old.

I some how ended up with very few pictures of the Lowentor Museum. I could have sworn that I took more pictures. They had some really cool life size models of different parts of the jungle and all kinds of stuffed animals.  They also had a a life size model of a blue whale which Shaelyn thought was the coolest thing (she couldn't decide if she liked it or the dinosaur models better).

Blue Whale

Inside of a Blue Whale

The Stuttgart Zoo!

In Stuttgart the tourist baureau has a discount ticket you can buy called the Stuttcard (cute little play on words). It includes 3 days of unlimited metro rides and free or discounted admission to several of the museums, plus free food and coffee. On our way to the m-punkt (tourist beaureau) which was only about a 20 minute walk from the hotel we passed the Rathaus or Town Hall. Above is Shaelyn pictured in front of Town Hall.

The Zoo is actual an arboretum, an aquarium and a zoo. We saw some pretty strange plants in the arboretum including the climbing cactus pictured below. Weird Huh? They also had the beautiful blue flowers whose name escapes me.


They had a cool little orange grove with all kinds of different oranges from around the world. Did you know that oranges originated in China and are not native to the States? I didn't know that. You learn something new every day. They even had banana trees. Who knew you could grow a banana tree indoors?






The aquarium was much smaller than the aquariums that we have in DC or Chicago but it was a nice little aquarium with some cool looking fish. Shaelyn enjoyed it and that's really all that matters. I enjoyed it to just not in the same way a 6 year old does. She took pictures of everything. Everything tank and every sign had it's picture taken. They had the normal fish plus a few cool things like the giant lung fish pictured below. I didn't know that lung fish got so large. Just in case you are wondering a lung fish really does have lungs. It can breath out of water for a number of years if need be. It's meant to strive in areas with long periods of draught.

Of course, being a Zoo they had a lot of the same things that we have at zoos here. One of the coolest things that they had were a bunch of baby gorilla's. The video and pictures below will show you just how young they are. Shaelyn loved them. She found the zoo keepers playing with the animals the coolest thing in the world. I did also. It's not everyday that you get to see person playing with a baby gorilla.

After we saw the fish we went and looked at the rest of the animals. It took us all day to go through the zoo. We ate at he zoo restaurant and it was really, really good. I would go back there if it was closer! The rest of the pictures below show the rest of our zoo visit.

Oranges and a Tucan

Jellyfish

Tapir

Plant House