launchers and wind tunnels. BioQuest In the mid-1990s, the museum announced a 4 phase expansion to their outdoor exhibits they called BioQuest. BioQuest included the construction of new exhibit spaces: Magic Wings Butterfly House, Explore the Wild, Catch the Wind, and the Dinosaur Trail and Dig. Magic Wings Butterfly House A major attraction at MLS is the three-story glass Magic Wings Butterfly House, which opened April 17, 1999, a butterfly zoo and tropical conservatory featuring a community of several hundred tropical butterflies representing dozens of species, as well as an array of tropical plants. The Bayer CropScience Insectarium, located in the Magic Wings Butterfly House, features exotic insects from around the world. This exhibit was the first of the BioQuest expansion to be completed. Explore the Wild Explore the Wild is home to American black bears, red wolves, lemurs, and radiated tortoises. It features a boardwalk over a preserved natural space, plus many multimedia exhibits. The exhibit opened in May 2006. The museum is part of preservation efforts for the red wolves and radiated tortoises. In spring 2017 the red wolf pair housed at the museum had a litter of 4 pups. These pups accounted for 2% of the entire red wolf population at the time. As part of the red wolf Specific Survival Plan the museum participates in, the family of wolves was moved to another facility in New York and a new pair of wolves came to the museum. Spring 2018 brought a litter of 2 pups to the new red wolf pair. The four wolves remain at the museum for the time being. In 2018 the museum joined efforts for radiated tortoise conservation after the April 20, 2018 discovery of 10,000 housed illegally in Madagascar. The museum hosted a fundraiser to raise money for the tortoises at the museum and a conservation group in August 2018. Catch the Wind Catch the Wind opened in the Summer of 2007 and features seven exhibits showing how the wind influences our environment. A interactive tower elevates oversized representations of seed pods of trees native to North Carolina and drops them demonstrating how wind affects their travel. The centerpiece of the area is a elliptical sailboat pond where visitors can sail remote controlled sailboats. Kiosks throughout the area allow visitors to listen to audio tracks of narratives, poems, and stories about the wind. Dinosaur Trail Long a local favorite, the original