Despite its name, the real highlight here is the Parker Manatee Rehabilitation Habitat, which nurses the ill and injured mammals back to health before releasing them into the wild. There’s the rub, though. Sometimes they do such a good job, there are no manatees to see here, so check their website to see what’s going on. When there are no manatees in residence, admission is reduced. The complex also features a museum with planetarium, and an outdoor area with scale models of the solar system, a freshwater pond filled with turtles, a science shed, and a 30-foot tree house. The museum itself is interesting, with fossil evidence of Florida’s earliest animal inhabitants, the Montague Tallant collection of prehistoric and early post-contact archeological artifacts, and an exhibit hall focusing on Florida’s ecology and biodiversity in the Pine Uplands and Riverine Galleries.