Life! Beginnings

NOW OPEN!

Life! Beginnings celebrates life's incredible ability to make more life. Discover how humans and all living creatures reproduce, develop, and pass on their genes to bring new life into the world.

Perform a mating dance with other animals, build a baby pigeon by mixing and matching its parents’ genes, and practice different parenting strategies from the animal kingdom. Step inside an immersive womb room to experience the human journey from conception to birth, and marvel at real fetal specimens. Experience the wonder of animal life cycles as live sphinx moths transform from hungry green caterpillars to fuzzy moths the size of your hand.

Life! Beginnings is located on the second floor World of Life gallery. This new exhibition is the first phase of a planned renovation of the entire World of Life gallery.

AHORA ABIERTO! Life! Beginnings—una nueva exhibición interactiva en el California Science Center

Exhibit highlights

Discover how humans and all living creatures reproduce, develop, and pass on their genes to bring new life into the world.

The immersive "womb room" in the Life! Beginnings exhibition, featuring a display of real human fetal specimens and a video of human fetal development

Experience the human journey, from conception to birth, inside an immersive “womb room,” and view real plastinated fetal specimens.

Guests play with a mating dance interactive in the Life! Beginnings exhibition

Can you woo a peacock spider, weedy seadragon, or blue-footed booby? Show off your fancy footwork in a gesture-based mating dance interactive.

Guests play with the build-a-bird game in Life! Beginnings

Build a baby pigeon and learn how genes from parents mix and match to create unique offspring.

Guests play with a tabletop fertilization game in the Life! Beginnings exhibition

It all starts here! Try to get sperm and egg to meet in this cooperative fertilization game.

Guests play with a tilt table interactive in the Life! Beginnings exhibition

Practice different parenting strategies from the animal kingdom and try to help your offspring reach adulthood.

A young girl looks at a model of a corpse lily in the Life! Beginnings exhibition

Discover how different species reproduce by exploring brilliant, life-size models.