Adults

Grab your hard hat! In Coors Gems and Minerals Hall, follow the mine shaft into a Mexican silver mine, where a cavern glistens with milky white gypsum crystals and stalactites. Then enter Colorado's own Sweet Home Mine to discover a six-foot wall of beautiful red rhodochrosite crystals.

Colorado was founded on mining, so you'll see more local finds, like Tom's Baby, an eight-pound nugget of crystallized gold unearthed in Breckenridge in 1887.

You'll also be dazzled by the largest known pocket of aquamarine ever discovered, from Colorado's own Mount Antero, and a giant Brazilian topaz once owned by artist Salvador Dali. The hall is packed with hundreds of specimens from around the world. Hands-on activities and videos help young explorers learn about mineral characteristics and how minerals form.

See the only collection of the remarkable Vasily Konovalenko gem sculptures on public display outside of Moscow.

Vasily Konovalenko (koh-noh-vuh-len-koh) was born in 1929 in Petrivka, Ukraine (just north of the Black Sea). After earning a degree in art and architecture, he became a stage designer for the Donetsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. He worked on productions of Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, and other classic operas and ballets.  In 1957, while working at the Mariinka Theatre in St. Petersburg, Konovalenko produced sets for the ballet Stone Flower, in which the protagonist is a stonecutter. Konovalenko's gem carvings for the ballet earned rave reviews, and he became smitten with the art form.

A journey through the eons allows you to trace the evolution of life on Earth, from single-celled organisms to lumbering dinosaurs to the inhabitants of today's world.

Travel through time-starting 3.5 billion years ago. Your journey begins beneath ancient seas. Life diversifies as you move through the millennia, surrounded by fearsome fish and waving sea lilies. Soon you're out of the water and the air is filled with huge dragonflies. Foot-long centipedes crawl around you. Then the dinosaurs appear!

There's a place from which nothing escapes, not even light, where time and space literally come to end. It's at this point, inside this fantastic riddle, that black holes exert their sway over the cosmos … and our imaginations.

In this Museum-produced show, zip through other-worldly wormholes, experience the creation of the Milky Way Galaxy, and witness the violent death of a star and subsequent birth of a black hole. Mathematical equations, cutting-edge science, and Einstein's theories fill in holes along the way, providing the most complete picture yet on this mysterious phenomenon. Can you feel the pull?