Mississippi Museum of Natural Science

The heart of the museum is its aquarium gallery, an open, light-filled hall lined with tanks that hold the fish, turtles, and reptiles of Mississippi's waters. Visitors can stand close to alligators, watch gars and catfish glide through the tanks, and see the astonishing variety of life that fills the state's rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. It is one of the most immersive displays of native aquatic life in the region.

Nearby, a two-story swamp exhibit brings a Mississippi wetland indoors, complete with towering recreated cypress, the sounds of the marsh, and the layered life of one of the South's signature habitats. Together the tanks and the swamp give visitors a vivid sense of a state defined by water, from the Mississippi River bottoms to the bayous and the Gulf marshes.

The museum keeps a collection of live native animals, among them snakes, turtles, amphibians, and birds of prey, cared for and shown so visitors can meet the creatures they might otherwise only glimpse in the wild. Programs and feedings throughout the day give people a closer look and a chance to learn how these animals live in Mississippi's woods and waters.

The galleries also tell the longer story of the state's natural history: its fossils and prehistoric sea creatures from the age when much of Mississippi lay beneath a warm ocean, its geology and soils, and the great range of habitats that stretch from the loess bluffs and hardwood hills of the north to the pine belt and the Gulf coast in the south. It is a portrait of a small state with a remarkable diversity of life.

One of the museum's finest features is that it does not end at its doors. Set within LeFleur's Bluff State Park, it opens onto a network of nature trails that wind through hardwood forest and along the wetlands and oxbows near the Pearl River. Walking them, visitors can find in the wild the same herons, turtles, and cypress they just saw in the exhibits.

The trails make the museum a genuine outdoor destination as well as an indoor one, and they connect the site to the wider green corridor of parks in this part of Jackson. Birdwatchers, walkers, and families all find room to roam, and the transition from gallery to living forest is part of what makes a visit here memorable.

Jackson and the Pearl River country lie in the ancestral homeland of the Choctaw people, who lived across this central part of Mississippi for generations, hunting and farming the river bottoms and pine woods. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians remains a federally recognized tribe in the state today, centered near Philadelphia to the northeast, and their long relationship with these lands and waters is part of the natural and human history the region holds.

The museum sits directly beside the Mississippi Children's Museum, and the two make an easy paired visit, especially for families. Together with the trails of LeFleur's Bluff and the museums and historic sites of downtown Jackson a short drive away, the natural science museum anchors a full and varied day in the capital.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.