Saturday, November 13, 2010

Visiting the Museum of Ancient Life

Just a quick update. Today was my 20th birthday, and I had a really great day. Not everything went as I had hoped it would (but not in the bad kind of way). Some things I had hoped to get done didn't happen. Oh well. It won't happen again for another year.
The biggest and coolest thing I did was go with a family member to the Museum of Ancient Life. I've been wanting to go for a while, and today that opportunity finally came. They had the coolest collection of fossils and ways to view the prehistoric worlds. I saw an actual skeleton of the dinosaur Supersaurus (a cousin of Apatosaurus) as well as a Brachiosaurus (and he/she was big). A dinosaur that I don't recall reading about before was Tanycolagreus (a small, carnivorous dinosaur from the Jurassic period). I also got to see some of the earliest dinosaurs (such as Herrerasaurus and Eoraptor) and other prehistoric animals (Dimetrodon, Eryops, and Dyictodont). Sorry, can't exactly remember the spelling on that last dinosaur. I did get to see some ceratopsians (cousins of Triceratops) that I had read about, but never seen in person. These cool dinosaurs were Chasmosaurus, Psittacosaurus, and Protoceratops. There were also several specimens of amber (the fossilized tree sap) with lots of bugs inside. Sorry, no one was digging in to extract dino blood like in Jurassic Park. Some of the first sea creature skeletons I saw included the giant turtle Archelon, the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus, and the mosasaur called Tylosaurus. They were really big (plenty of reason to stay out of the prehistoric oceans). There was also this cool diorama of the age of the dinosaurs (using dino figures found in the gift shop). A few other skeletons I got my first look at included Struthiomimus (a relative of Gallimimus from Jurassic Park), Anhanguera (a type of pterosaur), a complete skeleton of Utahraptor (a cousin of the Velociraptors), Gargoyleosaurus (a type of ankylosaurus), and Othnelia. All in all, that was a very fun trip.

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