Cook Museum of Natural Science

Tucked into a 62,000-square-foot building in downtown Decatur, Alabama, the Cook Museum of Natural Science has grown from a small insect collection into one of north Alabama’s most distinctive family attractions. Just a few blocks from the Tennessee River, the museum draws visitors from across the region who come for a full day of hands-on exploration rather than a quiet walk past glass cases.

The museum’s roots go back to 1968, when John Cook, Sr. began sharing his personal insect collection with the public. That collection had originally been used to train employees at Cook’s Pest Control, the family business, but it quickly grew into something bigger. By 1980, the Cook family had assembled rocks, minerals, fossils, coral, shells, and mounted migratory birds into a 5,000-square-foot museum that toured pieces through Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia and welcomed more than 750,000 visitors before closing in 2016. Rather than let that legacy fade, the family reimagined the whole operation as a nonprofit, and the current Cook Museum of Natural Science opened in its present downtown Decatur location on June 7, 2019, with its own 501(c)(3) status and a mission built around hands-on family learning.

Inside, the museum is organized into a sequence of themed galleries rather than one long hallway of dioramas. Visitors move through Discover, Looking Up, Foundations, Rivers & Streams, Caves, Arctic/Desert, Oceans, Forests, and the Wonderful World of Insects, each built around touchable specimens, interactive stations, and kid-scale activities like kinetic sand tables and meteorite displays. The Forests gallery includes a rope bridge that lets younger visitors climb above the exhibit floor (it is the one section of the museum that is not wheelchair accessible; the rest of the building, including an elevator and chairlift to the upper level, is designed to be reachable by everyone, and the museum keeps courtesy wheelchairs on hand at no charge).

Live animals are a central part of the experience rather than an afterthought. Saltwater fish, live coral, and moon jellyfish share space with freshwater turtles and fish, while the reptile terrariums hold eastern hellbenders, an eastern indigo snake, and alligators. Three dedicated classrooms support school field trips and camps, and a Baby Care and Quiet Room, along with sensory kits and headphones, are available for families who need a calmer pace through the galleries.

The educational side of the museum has grown substantially since it reopened. It now serves more than 18,000 students annually on field trips from 21 counties across Alabama, with more than 7,000 additional children taking part in camps and classes each year. In 2026, the state of Alabama designated the museum as the North Alabama STEM Center and appropriated $9.5 million toward the expansion, funding that Executive Director Scott Mayo has said will help the museum nearly double its STEM lab capacity from three labs to about six, since demand from area schools regularly outpaces available space.

A café called Nature’s Table operates on-site Monday through Saturday, giving families a place to refuel without leaving the building, and a museum store near the entrance stocks nature-themed toys, books, and gifts. The museum keeps a fairly consistent schedule: Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with seasonal Sunday hours from noon to 5 p.m. between Memorial Day and Labor Day. It closes on Thanksgiving and Christmas but stays open on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, a detail worth knowing for anyone planning a holiday-week visit to Decatur.

Because the Cook Museum sits within walking distance of the Princess Theatre and the rest of downtown Decatur’s historic district, it works well as an anchor for a longer visit to the area rather than a standalone stop. Parking is available adjacent to the museum on 4th Avenue NE as well as on nearby Holly and Cherry streets. For a river city with a population under 60,000, the scale and polish of the museum’s exhibits, and the fact that it grew directly out of a local family’s private collection rather than a franchised science-center model, make it one of the more genuinely distinctive stops in this part of the Tennessee Valley.