Museum Learning Center

About the Museum Learning Center:  If you’re looking for something that will dazzle you to see in a small town, be sure to stop by the Museums Learning Center (otherwise known as the “Dinosaur Musuem.”  This place is one huge labor of love and a microcosm of what makes this community special.   Your adventure starts in the hall of giants, a room full of massive life-like dinosaur and other Cretaceous Period animal replicas.  Surrounding those are shadow boxes filled with actual fossils from different periods.  On the west end of the hall is a glassed-in room where live Archaeologists periodically work in front of visitors scrupulously chiseling away the clay around the bones of the Missouri dinosaur.  The next layer of exhibits centers around the fossils of that now-famed dinosaur and the current dig happening just south of Sainte Geneviève.  The entire upstairs moves more toward modern times and focuses on interesting collections from a variety of topics, from Civil War Battlefields, to the objects found buried in the outhouses that used to reside in the yards of early St. Louisans.  The story that you won’t get that makes this so impressive is the collections on display, and the dinosaur replicas that delight all the visitors, are the work of one man, Guy Darrough (pictured above in the train-conductor hat).  Even the display cases and environmental decorations are made right here in the museum by his brother, Fred.  That’s what’s meant by this being a massive labor of love.  Guy wanted a place to show his work, and the community rallied around him to buy this building and create a shrine to his work.  It’s been a massive undertaking.

The only portion of the museum that wasn’t Guy’s doing deals with the abundance of history and the preserved artifacts found in and around Sainte Geneviève.  One of the more impressive pieces is a shadowbox of taxidermy birds done by one-time Ste. Gen resident, John James Audubon, he gave to Ferdinand Rozier his longtime friend and business partner who is one of the forefather of this town.