International Wildlife Museum

Behind these walls once stood one of the odder taxidermy collections in the Southwest: more than 400 species arranged as habitat dioramas. The mounts included a tiger nicknamed Big Terror, taken in India in 1969, a woolly mammoth, a passenger pigeon, and penguins recovered from Richard Byrd's Antarctic expedition. C. J. McElroy founded the museum in 1988 as an educational program of the Safari Club International Foundation. The collection grew for 35 years on donations from government wildlife agencies, zoos, and captive-breeding programs, some specimens already a century old when they arrived. The Foundation closed the program for good at the end of that run, and the castle building has since passed into private hands.