Panama Tourism: The Biomuseo

ON THE TOURIST-FRIENDLY DISTRICT OF the Ambador Causeway, the BioMuseo is widely regarded as Panama City’s premiere museum. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute ornithologist George Angehr was the chief curator and he calls it the world’s first biodiversity museum.

Through eight exhibits, a garden, and two ten-meter-high-aquariums, it tells the story of how the Panama isthumus bridged two continents and created a unique mixing biological mixing bowl of sorts in the process.

The research into the isthmus is relatively new. It’s exact age was determined only within a 10-year survey from the Smithsonian which sparked this natural museum.

The museum’s facade sticks out for it’s multiple colors and geometry-defying angles. It serves as Frank Gehry’s only architectural work in Latin America.

The museum has eight permanent exhibits. One enables visitors to experience the rain forest surrounded on all sides– as well as above and below–with video screens and other sensory elements. Another, the great exchange, features life-size sculptures of animals in primordial eras before later geological eras reduced them to the sizes we know them today.

A trippy life-size mushroom in a different exhibit spore shows how wasps and fungus spores symbiotically foster one another’s survival.