Dolphin Research Center dolphin

Two giant dolphin statues greet drivers at the Dolphin Research Center on Grassy Key, and behind them lies a piece of Hollywood and Keys history. The centre is at mile marker 59 on the Overseas Highway, on an island the Keys Weekly places under the Marathon umbrella. In a May 2025 history column the paper wrote that, driving west, "the two giant dolphin statues in the parking lot make it hard to miss". In 2014 Time Out described the statue of a bottlenose dolphin in front of the centre as Mitzi, the star of the original Flipper movie.

The Keys Weekly traces the site to fisherman Milton Santini, who sold captured dolphins to aquariums. It says he caught Mitzi in Florida Bay in 1955 and later ran Santini's Porpoise School on Grassy Key, where she was one of as many as 15 performing dolphins. Mitzi died of heart failure in 1972. Wometco Enterprises then opened Flipper's Sea School, and after a 1977 sale the property was closed to the public and renamed the Institute for Dolphin Research. Later renamed the Dolphin Research Center, it has been open to the public since 1984 as an educational facility promoting marine mammal awareness, according to the column.