Last month it was birds and now it’s bees. Guadalajara’s Museum of Paleontology continues its fine tradition of hosting fascinating exhibits which may not have much to do with dinosaur bones, but excel at making natural science interesting and understandable to the average person.

Three of Great Britain’s top experts on tarantulas – Andrew Smith, Stuart Longhorn and Guy Tansley – recently paid a visit to the Ecological Center of Pinar de la Venta, where naturalist Rodrigo Orozco is raising 6,000 tarantulas in captivity with an aim to ending poaching of these spiders in Mexico.

Río de la Pasión (Passion River) is 22 kilometers long and for much of its length serves as a wiggly border between the states of Jalisco and Michoacán.

Ceboruco Volcano looms 2,260 meters high above the little town of Jala, Nayarit, located 120 kilometers northwest of Guadalajara.

“If I were to make an organizational chart of the most important mammals in the world, I would put bats at the very top,” said naturalist Rodrigo Orozco.

The mines of El Amparo were among Mexico’s most successful and the ruins of that grandiose enterprise are well worth a visit.