House Mouse
The mouse most closely tied to people is best identified by a nearly bare scaly tail and muted gray-brown body—and best managed by sealing the building, not chasing the animal.
Places and wildlife — page 2
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Deer Mouse
Missouri’s open-country Peromyscus is a large-eyed seed cacher whose crisp brown-over-white coat is recognizable, but whose indoor traces demand sanitation rather than close inspection.
Missouri Mule
A famously strong horse–donkey hybrid that powered Missouri farms, freight, pioneer travel, and military logistics.
Ozark Hellbender
A giant, fully aquatic salamander breathing through folded skin beneath the flat rocks of exceptionally clean Ozark rivers.
Paddlefish
Missouri’s largest fish feeds on some of the smallest prey: it swims open water with a cavernous mouth filtering zooplankton while its paddle-shaped snout senses the river ahead.
Niangua Darter
A brilliantly colored small fish restricted to a handful of clear tributaries in Missouri’s Osage River basin.
Bluestripe Darter
A slender three-inch darter found nowhere beyond Missouri, with breeding males temporarily transformed by intense blue-black bars.
Grotto Sculpin
A pale cave-adapted fish discovered as a distinct species only after genetics clarified its isolation beneath southeastern Missouri.
Big Creek Crayfish
A small, speckled crayfish survives in a handful of cold, rocky St. Francis headwaters, where moving bait or muddy gear can cross a boundary the animal never would.
Tumbling Creek Cavesnail
A translucent snail only millimeters long ties one dark Missouri stream to clean recharge water, stone biofilm, gray-bat nutrients, and choices made on the land above.
National WWI Museum and Memorial
A deeply researched global history museum beneath Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial, built around objects, voices, trenches, and difficult choices.
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
A story-rich museum where baseball brilliance, segregation, entrepreneurship, community life, and integration meet at historic 18th & Vine.
Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum
A candid presidential museum connecting Truman’s Missouri life to the atomic age, Cold War, civil rights, Korea, and modern presidency.
City Museum
A gigantic artist-built environment of tunnels, slides, mosaics, caves, salvaged architecture, rooftop creatures, and joyful spatial confusion.
Saint Louis Art Museum
A broad, admission-free collection in Forest Park, especially strong in German art, ancient cultures, decorative arts, and changing exhibitions.
Missouri History Museum
A free museum using objects, neighborhoods, oral histories, and changing exhibitions to ask how St. Louis became itself.
American Jazz Museum
An interactive music museum tracing jazz through sound, instruments, artists, and the distinctive all-night culture of Kansas City.
Museum at the Gateway Arch
A free underground museum examining St. Louis, Indigenous nations, empire, river commerce, migration, and the contested idea of western expansion.
Ozark National Scenic Riverways
A long, living river park protecting the Current and Jacks Fork, enormous springs, caves, mills, gravel bars, and Ozark communities.
Gateway Arch National Park
A compact urban national park joining the stainless-steel Arch, riverfront landscape, Old Courthouse, museum, and a difficult national story.
Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park
A rugged gorge where the Black River squeezes through ancient volcanic rock, forming chutes, pools, cascades, and powerful currents.
Elephant Rocks State Park
An accessible loop through enormous rounded pink-granite boulders, historic quarry remains, inscriptions, woodland, and irresistible geology.
Taum Sauk Mountain State Park
A rugged mountain park containing Missouri’s high point, rocky glades, long-distance trail connections, and the route to Mina Sauk Falls.
Prairie State Park
A rare surviving tallgrass landscape where bison, elk, fire, wildflowers, birds, and enormous skies restore Missouri’s western edge.
Ozark Trail: Taum Sauk Section
A demanding roughly 35-mile Ozark Trail section crossing Missouri’s highest and oldest mountain country between major state parks.
Mina Sauk Falls Trail
A rocky mountain loop leading to a 132-foot seasonal cascade whose drama depends strongly on recent rainfall.
Whispering Pines Trail
A beloved Ozark loop through shortleaf pine, sandstone bluffs, clear creeks, hardwood valleys, and quiet backcountry camps.
Mastodon State Historic Site
A museum and protected landscape where mastodon remains were found with a human-made stone point, linking people to Ice Age Missouri.
Graham Cave
A sandstone overhang above the Loutre River preserves repeated human visits across roughly ten millennia, making soil layers and discarded fragments more important than any reconstructed scene.
Towosahgy State Historic Site
Towosahgy asks the visitor to rebuild a fortified Mississippian town from quiet ground: a central plaza, six surviving mounds, borrow pits, house depressions, and the buried line of repeated stockades.
Washington State Park Petroglyphs
Two protected rock-art sites above Missouri’s Big River reward slow looking at pecked lines, footprints, birds, human figures, weathering, and the limits of modern interpretation.
Iliniwek Village State Historic Site
The archaeological remains of a large Illinois Confederation village documented when the Jolliet-Marquette expedition traveled the Mississippi in 1673.
Eurasian Tree Sparrow
A chestnut-capped sparrow whose unusual North American foothold began with nineteenth-century introductions around St. Louis.
Three-toed Box Turtle
A nearly statewide woodland turtle with a hinged shell, strong homing instinct, and highly individual face and shell patterns.
North American Bullfrog
Missouri’s largest frog broadcasts a deep jug-o-rum from permanent water, where one missing pair of back folds separates it from the smaller Green Frog.
North American River Otter
Missouri’s restored river predator travels as a low muscular ripple, leaving paired tracks, fish-scaled latrines, and bank slides that only become convincing when read together.
Salem Cave Crayfish
A pale, long-limbed cave crayfish restricted to groundwater systems in Missouri’s east-central Ozarks.
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
A small, exceptionally focused museum where changing exhibitions unfold through Tadao Ando’s meditative concrete architecture.
National Museum of Transportation
Forty-two acres turn transportation history back into scale: locomotives tower overhead, streamliners expose competing futures, and outdoor track makes weather and distance part of the museum.
Arabia Steamboat Museum
A vast cargo recovered from the sunken steamboat Arabia turns frontier commerce into a remarkably intimate time capsule; confirm operating status before making a special trip.
Missouri State Museum
A free museum spread through Missouri’s working Capitol, pairing statewide history with architecture, civic art, and legislative space.
Forest Park
A vast urban park combining free cultural institutions, restored waterways, trails, sports, memorials, and layers of 1904 World’s Fair history.
Rock Bridge Memorial State Park
A sinkhole-and-cave landscape with a natural rock bridge, underground stream, restored grassland, and routes from boardwalk strolls to wild-area hikes.
Castlewood State Park
Castlewood climbs from the Meramec floodplain to an exposed limestone rim, where resort-era stairs and a long river bend turn one hike into both landscape and history.
Rock Island Trail State Park
A 47.5-mile developed rail-trail linking Pleasant Hill and Windsor, where it meets the Katy Trail, with a much longer future corridor still undeveloped.
Devil’s Icebox Trail
A compact boardwalk loop crossing a natural rock bridge to cold cave air, sinkholes, a spring, and an underground stream.
Table Rock State Park
Table Rock State Park is not one lake stop but a working Branson base camp: paved shoreline, technical woodland trail, two campgrounds, a public ramp, marina rentals, and open water that demands its own plan.
Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield
The first major Civil War battle west of the Mississippi, interpreted through a visitor center, five-mile tour road, Ray House, and Bloody Hill.