Before officially starting at the museum, they gave me a packet for which I could get familiar with the information that pertains to two particular exhibits: The Root Family Exhibit and the Prehistoric Exhibit. The Root Family Exhibit was an exhibit donated to the museum by Chapman Root; the collection began with his grandfather, C. J. Root. The exhibit covers many things – teddy bears, train cars, classic cars, but most importantly, what ties the collection together is Coca Cola. The Root Family was instrumental into the development of the bottle that holds Coca Cola to this day. If you ever visit the museum, you will see an entire wall of bottles that were prototypes for Coca Cola but didn’t last, for one reason or another. In an adjoining gallery, the same goes for vending machines that dished out the beverage. There’s a bunch of them of them to show how they changed over the years.

The Prehistoric Gallery is another big one on tours. Kids tend to love it, because the star of the gallery is our giant ground sloth, which could stand up to thirteen feet tall. Last time I did this tour, a student asked me: “why is a dinosaur standing behind you?” It’s also a lot of fun, because the giant ground sloth and mastodon were both found and dug up in Daytona, which is a point of pride for the museum. Plus, Florida doesn’t get many giant fossil finds. Additionally, the giant ground sloth at MOAS is the most complete giant ground sloth in all of North America, so it has been used to make casts for other museums in the country. Pretty cool!