This article briefly sketches the evolution of live animal displays in twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. museums of science and natural history, in order to show how these exhibits function as a sampling device for changing postwar pedagogies of science learning. Live animal displays have been, more often than not, interpreted by both their creators and their visitors in surprising ways. Such contingent developments, I argue, suggest how museum educators working in informal settings might use the affordances that their spaces provide to connect STEM learning theory to display practice and also to engage productively the needs and identities of diverse museum audiences and learners.