Orcas: Our Shared Future

One of the life-size orcas here is Ruffles, a replica of a real whale the biologist Alisa Schulman-Janiger first saw in the wild in the 1980s, foraging beneath her while her future husband stood beside her.

The show fills 10,000 square feet with about 140 artifacts and specimens. You walk through rooms ringed with floor-to-ceiling screens of orcas in the wild, past a life-size family of three replicas and a sculpture of an adult female's skeleton. Masks, sculptures and prints by Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous artists sit beside the science, and the story of captivity and film runs down to an original Free Willy VHS from 1993. If your parents' garage still holds that tape, you'll recognise one of the artifacts.

The orca expert Fred DeNisco told LAist it is "so unique in the breadth of topics that it covers". Kids get touchable specimens and interactives on field research. It's a separate ticket on top of general admission: $12 adults, $6 children, free for members.