Qualla: Museum of Life and Science

Museum of Life and Science: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a Mercury space capsule sitting inside a museum building in north Durham, and a chimpanzee named Enos used to ride inside it. On November 29, 1961, Enos became the only chimpanzee, and the third primate, to orbit Earth - a flight that proved the Mercury capsule was safe enough for a human, three months before John Glenn climbed in himself. The capsule eventually wound up here, on the campus of what is now the Museum of Life and Science, on loan from the Smithsonian. It is one of the strangest and most genuine collections of space artifacts you'll find anywhere outside Washington: a Moon rock, Neil Armstrong's dosimeter, pieces of an Apollo Lunar Rover, a full-sized mockup of a Lunar Module. None of it should be here. All of it is.

Image: DiscoA340 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum of Life and Science: The Little Green Hut

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit photographer: Tony Rice, CC BY 2.5. The museum did not begin as anything grand. In its early years it was a small green building on Murray Avenue in the Northgate Park neighborhood, run on a shoestring, focused on local natural history and a few hands-on exhibits for children. The thing that changed it was a person...

Image: photographer: Tony Rice | CC BY 2.5

Museum of Life and Science: Dinosaurs by Hand

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RadioFan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wescott built dinosaurs too. In 1967 he completed what he called the Prehistoric Trail - more than twenty life-size plaster models of amphibians, reptiles, and dinosaurs lining a wooded path along Ellerbe Creek. Seymouria. Eryops. Dimetrodon. Plateosaurus. Camptosaurus. A Brontos...

Image: RadioFan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Museum of Life and Science: Wolves, Tortoises, Butterflies

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rtphokie, CC BY 2.5. The museum's expansion through the late 1990s and 2000s - a project called BioQuest - turned 84 acres of post-industrial land into one of the more unusual zoos in the Southeast. The three-story glass Magic Wings Butterfly House opened on April 17, 1999, packed with hundreds of tr...

Image: Rtphokie | CC BY 2.5

Museum of Life and Science: Hideaway Woods and Earth Moves

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit monsieuricon from Montréal, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. What the museum has done best, over the decades, is treat children as competent. Hideaway Woods opened in 2015 - two acres of nature play built around eight treehouses, a flowing stream, and an enclosed space for the smallest kids. There are no signs telling you what to do. You j...

Image: monsieuricon from Montréal, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0