Cave City, Kentucky - Mammoth Cave Wildlife Museum

The Mammoth Cave Wildlife Museum is worth a stop amid the caves and concrete wigwams in Cave City, despite its boring name. Their brochure is ambiguous about whether the wildlife you will see in the attraction, which dates to the late sixties, is alive or dead.

Fortunately for fans of Roadside America, they're all very dead and stuffed "in their natural environments!" (presumably fluorescent-light niches with plastic plants). The whole place smells like mothballs, with a weird stucco faux-cave interior.

Especially good exhibits include a beetle with a human face, a polar bear "shot by an eskimo" and a big taxidermied lobster proudly provenanced to the local Kroger supermarket. In what I think is irony, some of the dead moths on display are literally moth-eaten, crumbling to dust in the glass cases. [Steve Archer, 05/21/2007]

[RA: We agree, this place is satisfying in that throwback wildlife museum way....]