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Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Dale Dunlop The Maritime Explorer

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Friday, January 17th, 2025

This is my eighth post from our November 2024 visit to Arizona and, given the title, one might be confused, as didn’t I just write one about a Sonoran Desert Museum in Phoenix? Yes I did, but that was the Desert Botanical Garden which specialized in the cacti and other plants native to the Sonoran Desert. Today’s post comes from Tucson, where you will find the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum that has a much wider focus on all things related to the Sonora Desert including the flora and fauna, geology, palaeontology and a lot more. In my opinion it is a fine complement to Phoenix’ Desert Botanical Garden and one should visit both while touring Arizona. I’ll explain why further on, but first we’ll make a short detour to Saguaro National Park which starts on the outskirts of Tucson not far from the J.W. Marriott where we are staying.

Saguaro National Park

One generally doesn’t think of the Republican Party as placing a high priority on the environment and that’s hard to argue with given the party’s current attempts to open up previously protected areas to oil, mining and agricultural interests. But that wasn’t always the case. It was Teddy Roosevelt who pushed through the Antiquities Act in 1906 that gave Presidents the power to designate National Monuments without having to go through congress. During his Presidency a number of national parks, including Crater Lake and Mesa Verde, were created. Just as importantly he used the power vested in him to protect the Grand Canyon, Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and Montezuma Castle which we visited earlier on this tour.

It was a group of Arizona Republicans who convinced outgoing President Herbert Hoover to designate a significant portion of Federal land just east of Tucson as Saguaro National Monument in 1933. 28 years later Arizonan Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior, convinced President Kennedy to add a separate 25 square mile tract in the Tucson Mountains to the National Monument. In 1994 Congress designated both tracts as Saguaro National Park. As the name implies, the purpose of the park is to protect, the saguaro cactus, the largest cactus species in the country.

As this map shows, despite being an iconic symbol of the American West, saguaros are actually only found in their natural state in southern Arizona and nowhere else in the country. Note that their range extends down much of the eastern side of the Gulf of California. The reason will become apparent when we visit the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum later in the day.

Before heading to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which is not far from the Tucson Mountains section of Saguaro National Park, I strongly suggest stopping at the Visitor Center and then driving the 6 mile (9.7 km.) Bajada Loop Drive to get a real feel of the Sonoran Desert.

To get there from Tucson, you need to traverse Gates Pass in Tucson Mountain Park, which has a number of scenic lookouts like the one below. The collection of buildings you see is Old Tucson, built as a movie set in 1939 and the spot where famous westerns like Gunfight at OK Corral, Rio Bravo, El Dorado and Tombstone were shot as well as the TV series Little House on the Prairie. 

Here is a small gallery of photos I took inside the park. Double click to open one and double click again to enlarge. As you can see from the photo on the lower right, not all saguaros have the classic upright arms. There are a number of reasons why a saguaro might become deformed including disease, frost or even lightning strikes.

Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

On its website the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum describes itself as a zoo, botanical garden, art gallery, natural history museum and aquarium and after visiting the place I can attest that these are all accurate descriptions. The one overall theme that ties them all together is the Sonora Desert. Ranked by Trip Advisor as the #1 attraction in Tucson, the museum is spread over 98 acres with two miles of walking trails featuring a number of different Sonora Desert habitats. It is a non-profit organization that has as its mission the conservation and presentation of the many sides of the Sonora Desert. Within its bounds are 31 mammal species, 72 bird species, 86 reptile species, 23 amphibian species, over 10,000 fish from 9 species and finally 78 species of arthropods. In terms of flora there are over 1,400 different species of plants. So if you had the preconception that the Sonora Desert was basically a place with little ecological variety, this place will change your mind about that very quickly.

This map lists a dozen different sections and a first time visitor should plan to see them all which will take the better part of three hours.

So let’s get started.

The last thing you might expect to see in a desert museum is an aquarium, but that’s stop #1 on the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum visit. Opened only in 2013 the Warden Aquarium features nine species of freshwater fish found in the rivers that flow through the Sonora Desert. The Colorado River is the most well known, but the Rio Yaqui and Rio Sonora, both of which are in northern Mexico, are also important biological aspects of the Sonora Desert. All three have been ravaged over the years by mankind’s insatiable thirst for water. Dams, diversions for agriculture and the introduction of invasive species have all but wiped out the original piscine species, but you can see some of them here including the world’s largest minnow. I know that sounds like an oxymoron similar to jumbo shrimp, but once you lay your eyes on the formidable Colorado pikeminnow you’ll change your mind.

This fish is a lot more pike than minnow and can grow to up to six feet (2 metres) and weigh 100 pounds (40 kg.). It was once the top predator in the Colorado River and so common as to be used for fertilizer. Today it is almost extinct in the wild as are most of the other native fish that were its source of prey. Why the hell they ever called it a minnow is beyond me.

There are a lot more species in the saltwater portion of the Warden Aquarium which features fish, mollusks and other creatures found in the Sea of Cortez into which the three rivers mentioned above eventually make their way.

The next stop is the Reptile, Invertebrate and Amphibian Hall where you’ll be surprised at just how many types of rattlesnakes are to be found in the Sonora Desert. I knew about western diamondbacks and sidewinders, but not about the black-tailed rattler which is apparently very common throughout southern Arizona and most of Mexico. You can see it, seven other species of venomous snakes and an equal number of non-venomous snakes that might a person with ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) think twice about venturing outside.

The most famous reptilian denizen of the Sonora Desert is the one with the most inapt name – the Gila monster. This is the largest lizard in the United States and while it is venomous, it is so slow and its venom so weak that it is no threat to humans. The only person to die from a Gila monster bite in about a century was a man with underlying immune conditions who was bitten by his pet. Yes you read that right, people keep them as pets. Unfortunately for these docile creatures, the name they have been given leads people to treat them like monsters and kill them for no reason.

This is the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum Gila monster who as you can see, is camera shy.

If you are afraid of snakes, spiders and such you might want to speed walk through this exhibit to area #3, the Earth Sciences Center & Cave.

I found this particular exhibit truly amazing. It does have one of the largest collection of Arizona gems and minerals in the world and that is impressive. This photo shows only a tiny fraction of what is on display. You have your own tour of some of the highlights by following this link.

What really grabbed my attention was this 360° diorama showing the evolution of the Earth in a manner that was clearer and easier to understand than anything I have come across previously. The photo does not come remotely close to capturing the brilliance of this exhibit. I would come to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum just to see this. What I appreciated was that, in a state where there are a significant and probably growing number of ‘creationists’, this scientific approach to how the planet evolved, destroys any notion that there was a ‘guiding hand’ at work. This museum is a very popular place to bring classes of school kids and I can only hope that what this exhibit portrays helps solidify, in their impressionable minds, the facts over the fiction.

And then, in the same room, I came something so ordinary looking and yet so mind blowing that week’s later I’m still trying to get my head around it.

This is a rock that is older than the Earth. Say what? It’s almost like trying to understand what was going on before you were born. This is a fragment of the Allende meteorite that fell to earth in the Mexican state of Chihuahua on February 8, 1969. It was the largest C chrondite meteorite ever found. Less than 5% of all meteorites are of this type and they contain chondrules i.e. grains, that are older than anything on earth and some particles older than the sun. It is in fact made from the cosmic dust that eventually formed the entire Solar System and is believed to have originated from the explosion of a super nova that some scientists believe was the generational cause of the Solar System. It also contains both minerals and organic compounds not found on earth. Considering that all life on Earth originated from organic compounds, what does that tell us about the possibility of other forms of life originating from different organic compounds not found on Earth. This is something that is truly out of this world and something I can’t stop pondering about it.

It’s now time to leave the darkness of the Earth Sciences Center and spend most of the rest of the visit to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in the great outdoors. This is a viewing platform that overlooks the Desert Loop Trail.

The next stop features prehistoric Arizona and in particular the state’s very own dinosaur. The palaeontology department of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum was responsible for excavating and identifying a previously unknown dinosaur species that once roamed the Sonora Desert. The aptly named Sonorasaurus was a brachiosaur, one of the largest creatures to ever walk the earth and evidence that environment in this area was remarkably different 100 million years ago. This is an artist’s impression of what Sonorasaurus might have looked like.

As we continued our way around the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum pathways I didn’t think we’d be encountering any dinosaurs, but I was mistaken. The museum was preparing for a Dinos in the Desert exhibit which runs from December 2024 through the spring of 2025 and feature life size replicas of eleven different species of dinosaurs. This guy has just arrived a little early.

I won’t go into detail about the various habitats that constitute most of the acreage of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, but suffice it say that they all have their own unique features. The Mountain Woodland recreates a Mexican pine-oak forest which is home to mountain lions, black bears, mule deer and the endangered Mexican gray wolf which the museum is engaged in trying to reintroduce into areas where it has been extirpated. You can see all four of these species on the pathway that makes its way through the Mountain Woodland.

The Desert Grassland features native grasses and the species that live among them including the always interesting prairie dogs. The museum has the only remaining black-tailed prairie dog town in the state. Once common across much of western United States and Canada (one colony in Texas once covered 25,000 sq. miles (64,000 sq. km.) and had over 400,000,000 individuals), they are now found almost only in protected areas such as Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan where I took this photo a few years ago. That is the only place in Canada you can now see prairie dogs and I am now standing on the only spot you can see them in Arizona.

Moving on you come to the entrance to the Desert Loop Trail which is a ½ mile loop where coyotes, javelinas and a variety of lizards are found along with saguaros, agaves and blue palo verde trees. This is the familiar habitat of this area of the Sonora Desert near Tucson.

Cat Canyon is the home to coatis, gray foxes and ocelots which were once far more abundant in Arizona than they are today.

Two creatures I did not expect to see on a journey through the Sonora Desert environments were otters and beavers, but in fact they are found along Sonora Desert river banks and natural springs as you’ll find out when you reach the Riparian Corridor. Also found in these desert oases are the Borrego Bighorn Sheep. This reminded me of an encounter I had years ago when solo hiking the Borrego Palm Canyon trail in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California when I ran into this guy. He was on the path which overlooked a gully about 30 feet below where his harem was feeding. He was watching over them and wasn’t going to let me pass. Not wanting to get head butted over the edge I had to wait for what seemed like an eternity before the harem moved on and he followed.

Even more bizarre than seeing beavers and otters is seeing stingrays, the fish, not the cars. Remembering once again that the Sonora Desert comes right down to the Sea of Cortez, the stingray tank did make sense.

The final stops at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outer itinerary are the Birds of the Sonoran Desert Aviary and the Hummingbird Aviary. As a birder these were both interesting stops, but the birds were uncooperative, refusing to stay still for a decent photo. However, I did get this shot of a phainopepla, often mistakenly called a ‘black cardinal’, which was posing on branch directly overhead. Almost exclusively found in the Sonora and Mojave deserts. this more than made up for the skittish birds in the aviaries.

Inside the trail that circles the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum are five distinct botanical gardens featuring agave, cactus, desert flowers, pollination and butterflies.

I did manage to end my time at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum by getting this queen butterfly to stay still long enough to get this photo.

So we’ve been all through every environment possible in the Sonora Desert and even taken a journey outside the solar system during our time at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. I hope I have convinced the reader to put this on your bucket list when you visit the Tucson area.

In the next post we’ll drive and walk through some of the most fantastic rock formations you’ll find anywhere, at Chiricahua National Monument.  Hope to see you there.