When I was planning my trip to Santa Fe, I did some research on things to do. One of the things that interested me was this bug museum. If you don’t like bugs, you probably shouldn’t continue reading this article, lol.
Harrell House of Oddities had some live reptiles and some dead bugs on display.
Getting a good picture of the reptiles was hard, so I only got two useable photos.
On the opposite side from the reptiles, you could see lots of insects, bugs and creepy crawlies.
The first thing you see in their case are these scorpions. They’re huge. I’d hate to get stung by a scorpion.
The next case had some large beetles in it. The dung beetle is gross.
These two beetles are really large.
This next case started showing insects that could fly.
These next two photos are of some great looking butterflies.
This is a large katydid from Malaysia.
Here are two large grasshoppers that come from Africa, Malaysia and South America.
Here we see some large spiders, a scorpion and what looks like two centipedes or something close.
Check out how many spiders they had on display.
Here’s a closer view.
This case had beautiful butterflies on each side and beetles down the middle. That is a lot of butterflies.
I’m not sure what was in this next case. Most have wings and some look like what we called “Walking Sticks”.
They had Praying Mantises in this next case.
These next few photos I can’t remember what they are.
I heard the owner/collector give the same speech several times to new visitors while I was sitting watching a video.
He would say that it’s his collection he started as a kid and it got out of hand. The visitors all agreed and chuckled.
He also said he had some of these specimens sent to him, so he could add them to his collection.
He said they all come rolled up and he has to hydrate them to spread them out and pin them in place inside the display case.
Next are cicadas, plant and treehoppers and lantern bugs of the world from South America, Malaysia and Australia.
I don’t even want to try and guess how many hours he’s spent touching all of these bugs in order to put them on display like this.
The displays look awesome the way the insects are all organized and symmetrical, but I could never touch some of these things even though they’re dead.
And lastly, here’s some more spiders.
They had a TV showing non-stop insect videos. I stayed there for over 30 minutes watching these very interesting videos.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at the Harrell House of Natural Oddities and Bug Museum of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Spider Michaels
Spider Michaels 