Dinosaurs

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Since all of the little titles seem to be flying creatures/dinorsuars, and since some people have made their custom avatars similar, I'm clearly not the only one here obsessed with such critters.

Anybody seen the exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History?

I especially liked the panorama.

If you're interested in dinosaurs/birds/cute little bitey things then keep clicking "NEXT" quite neat.

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/dinosaurs/diorama/

I went to the Museum of Natural History a lot when I was kid! I didn't know they changed the name... good to know

It's probably always been the AMNH.

Probably just one of those things where you leave part of it out.
I only used the full name to distinguish it from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

The American Museum of Natural History is one of my favorite places in the world! I love the exhibit of the Barosaurus being attacked by the Allosaurus in the main hall, and the fact that Ornithischians and Saurischians have two seperate halls. I've been there twice in the past year, and would gladly go again had I the time and means. It's almost a religious experience for me.

I also have this crappy picture of me standing in front of a Deinonychus skeleton, looking completely enthusiastic:



I've also been to:

Museum of Science in Boston. A mediocre dinosaur collection (though they once had a cast of Sue come by to visit), but a nice life-sized T.rex and a roaring T.rex machine that responds when you slip money into it--I gave it a little slipped on which I had written "I.O.U." Ask Serissa for the details.

Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge MA. Lots of old, stuffed animals as well as skeletons. This place truly has a dusty, stale atmosphere. Some of the stuffed animals are in bad shape, and may well be over 100 years old. The skeletons are nice, however, because there is a Deinonychus here (well, fragments of it), a Plateosaurus, a Kronosaurus, a Triceratops skull (under the obsolete species name eurycephalus) and some Triassic footprints of an amphibian of some sort.

Smithsonian in D.C. This was not nearly as good as AMNH, but it has it's good share of prehistoric beasts. There is a large Quetzalcoatlus wing, for instance, an Edmontosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus, and one of the two Diceratops skulls in existence. In this picture, I am standing in front of a composite Triceratops skeleton:



Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. I grew up here, and lived in PA for at least 4 years. My first memory of this museum was one in which I was very young, maybe two or three, and more than a little afraid of getting too close to the skeletons. But they have a wonderful collection here. The main hall greets you with the skeletons of a Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Protoceratops, and Tyrannosaurus rex way in the back (beind it is an ancient mural of a T.rex with an inaccurate number of fingers).

Mesa Southwest Natural History Museum in Arizona. There were lots of skeletons, but they were nearly all casts. These included a young Trabosaurus, a Camarasaurus, Bactrosaurus, and Zuniceratops. But the museum covers a lot of stuff both in the natural history of Arizona an it's cultural history. There is also a truly lovely life-sized model of a Dilophosaurus outside the entrance:





It's where I got that t-shirt that I'm wearing in the "picture" thread in "Members Only".

Natural History Museum in Vienna Austria. Another mediocre collection. To be perfectly honest, I don't even remember what dinosaurs were there, though I do remember standing in front of a large ornithopod of some sort, maybe an Iguanodon. There was plenty of other natural stuff in the museum, like an enormous stuffed male elephant seal that was bigger than a car. There was also this disgusting coelocanth that was preserved in formaldehyde. The stuff must have bled it of all color, for it was deathly white, and so were many of the other fish, amphibians, and reptiles I saw suspended in their fluid crypts. It was a veritable mausoleum for small animals.

Natural History Museum in the UK. I've forgotten the name. This a remarkable museum, in which a huge Diplodocus greets visitors in the entrance. In the dinosaur hall, you can see a Camarasaurus, Albertosaurus, Baryonyx, and a few others. When I was here I played the guessing game that I play whenever I visit museums. That is, I tried to guess what genus each dinosaur skeleton was before I got close enough to read the label. I got everything right except for the Albertosaurus (I mistook it for a Daspletosaurus instead).

Last edited by Thagomizer on 15 Nov 2005, 11:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My names a flying creature.

My list of Natural History/Science Museums is much shorter.

Washington, New York, Boston, Springfield (the real Springfield, not some lame ripoff out in Illinois), and the Pratt Museum in Amherst.

Also been to the Dinosaur Footprints in South Hadley so often I've come to see it as mundane.

While I love museums, the rest of my family, except, to some extent, my mother, does not, which means that when we travel, I get to go to far fewer than I'd like.