Yazd Science Museum

Centuries ago, scholars settled in Iran’s Yazd, the City of Windcatchers (a windcatcher being an ancient architectural cooling system) and established it as a center for scientific learning. So it serves as an apt home for the Yazd Science Museum, founded in 1991 as an extension of the Iranshahr School.

An exhaustive range of science fields are represented within the museum. Among them, you can explore a detailed forest amid real (taxidermied) animals—or try your hand at the basics of this art of preserving creatures. For those happy to keep their hands clean while still experiencing a healthy blend of awe and queasiness, the biology section exhibits life at all its stages, from embryo formation to a roughly 800-year-old woman’s skeleton.