Las Vegas Science & Natural History Museum

This guide to the Las Vegas Science & Natural History Museum opens with a science writer's blunt review of its animatronic dinosaur hall, before turning to the community push that built the museum itself: a 1989 city council meeting, a one-dollar-a-year lease on a building along Las Vegas Boulevard, and the volunteers who covered every renovation until the doors opened in 1991. It follows the shark and stingray tank, the whale skull, and the gallery of Egyptian relics donated by a Strip casino. Listen for how much of what's on display here was built purely because people refused to let the collection have nowhere to go.