Museum of the Rockies

The Museum of the Rockies reportedly has one of the best fossil collections of any museum in the country. I had wanted to check the place out for years.

Outside the museum there’s a large bronze T-rex skeleton. A cryptic sign to his side reads, “Don’t climb on Big Mike.” Inside I was given stickers to identify me as I paid my admission, they were in the form of a fingerprint that was doodled on to look like the head of a T-rex.

The first exhibit, and a rather large one, was a set of vivariums, all with bizarre frogs in them, many even I hadn’t seen before, with a few familiar faces peering through the poison dart frog and American bull frog habitats. They were adorable, even the odd pug-faced one. I realize frogs are great indicators of the health of an ecosystem and are studied by many universities but I still wasn’t expecting this.

I moved on and found a little local history section of the museum, complete with horse buggies, a Model A, a surplus army buffalo hide coat, buffalo hide mittens that looked like they’d been sloughed off Big Foot, and a number of strange devices you had to guess what they were. Here in their mock up of an 1880 kitchen I recognized a familiar tool, one part of my own kitchen, a set of hand crank egg beaters. Maybe I am old fashioned but I still far prefer these to the electric beaters most people have which are big, clunky, need room to store, and are a pain in the ass to clean. Besides, how else am I to work up my arm muscles if not making home-made whip cream?

Next I came across a section in the museum where photography was expressly denied. In the pamphlet it read, “Learn about the people who came before us.” I am not sure they could have worded that any worse but I winced going in. There were wax figures of Indians, and descriptions of their gods and beliefs. I don’t know… I can see why photography was forbidden. I had a strong feeling this would piss people off. Sort of like if I made an exhibit of an alter and put a plaque up about the crazy shit Catholics believe…

Finally I got into the dinosaurs, and fish, and sharks, and various other fossils. The largest T-rex head was here. She was impressive (though if I remember right had a male name, “Big Al” or something similar, poor dear.) One of the more impressive displays was that of the growth of a triceratops. They had the smallest little baby to the biggest adult. They also had baby miasaurs, and a baby pachycephalosaur which stole my heart. In the good old days paleontologists thought these baby dinosaurs were completely different species because they looked so drastically different from their parents, especially pachycephalosaur, whose babies were once called Draco Rex because they look exactly like a dragon. I was thrilled. I had known growing up that if you want to go into the paleontology field you get schooled here.. where research continues to be ground breaking, no pun intended. Montana remains the most fossil rich state in the union and routinely provides rarities like nesting sites and baby dinosaurs, rare sharks, and other dazzling little oddities. There were three women working in the lab here, dissolving rock in acid and extracting the bones. Another woman took some children around for a tour, making a big show of a dinosaur found with raptor teeth scattered all around it. Apparently it’d been lunch at some point in time.

I had fun, this place was neat, although I must admit they really overdid the feathers on some of the little dinosaur statues. One of them looked like a reptilian drag queen. C’est la vie.

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June 27, 2011 0

La Brea tar Pits – Los Angelas California

LA was on the list of destinations although I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why. It seemed like another stinking apocalyptic urban wasteland to me… It took me days to realize it was probably marked off because of the La Brea Tar Pits. I have wanted to see the La Brea tar pits since I was a tot. I drove in and found the tar pits parking lot. It was almost full with maybe four or five spaces that could only fit the tiniest of cars, not a bloated Jeep. I drove around in circles around and around until the parking attendant made us a spot that didn’t technically exist before. We thanked him and headed towards what looked like a park.

There were kids swarming everywhere but I couldn’t have expected any less. The whole place reeked, a stench like no other. It was the tar pits bubbling away. I walked over towards it. There was indeed a big nasty mud puddle of a pond, it’s top layer covered in thick black goo, and bubbles belching from the deep. It really did smell as bad as it looked. To one corner there was a recreation of a mammoth getting stuck, it’s little mammoth family on shore going, “Noooooooo!” I could tell the mammoth that was stuck was actually floating…

I went into the museum and was told I was getting free admission because it was the first Tuesday of the month. This explained why there were so many children. I walked in and was greeted by a giant ground sloth skeleton. He was a huge beast with very odd feet. I walked around and read the signs and looked at the skeletons. They had everything here from every type of scavenger birds to hundreds of dire wolves, saber toothed cats, jaguars, weasels, mice, amphibians, mammoths, and even one woman.

There was a large laboratory in the middle of the building surrounded by plexiglass so that visitors could watch the paleontologists do their work. There was a woman in there separating grains of sand, one at a time, with a paintbrush, picking out the most minute of bones. She had managed to find maybe four or five minuscule little mice bones. I moved on and saw a mammoth back on display. Poor dear had arthritis of some kind. There was another display showing a mammoth bone next to an Asian elephant bone. I had no idea mammoths were so much bigger!

I stopped to watch a 16 minute documentary that was playing in the theater. It explained how most of the bones came to be here, with one animal getting stuck and then scavengers and predators trying to eat the stuck animal while getting trapped themselves. It also had interesting little tidbits about what the tar pits actually were… raw asphalt basically. Apparently the local Indians used the substance to waterproof their living quarters.

I ended up in the gift shop and decided to buy a magnet. As I sat in line I watched a baby in a stroller play with a blob of black goo, apparently some sort of mock tar toy. I laughed as I said, “Watch her eat that thing.” There was jars of the stuff at the counter and I decided to look at it to see what it actually was. There was no ingredients listed, only a label saying non-toxic. There was a sample smushed in a petri dish with two little dinosaur toys stuck in it. I poked at it and a bored cashier came by and started talking. I don’t really remember what he said initially but someone asked if the woman was on display here. He said she was taken down seven years ago due to political strife from local Native Americans. Seems right.

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June 7, 2011 0

The Baltimore Aquarium – Maryland

I was told that the Baltimore Aquarium was a pretty good aquarium and although I’ve seen a lot of salt water fish at salt water stores and other aquariums I decided to go and check it out. The place was pretty infested with children of all ages – none listening to a damn thing their chaperones were saying. I expected this and am somewhat used to it, although I’m not much fonder of the little squirts.

The first thing I came across was an enormous tank which I could stand over at many points. It was devoid of plant and coral but absolutely filled with all sorts of rays, a three-legged sea turtle, a zebra shark, a guitar fish, and some other interesting things. I tried to take photos with my camera but it told me, “In this lighting?! Are you kidding me?!”

As I wandered away from the tank I walked into a hallway filled with fresh water fish, brackish fish, salt water fish, and ocean fish. These things looked familiar and unimpressive and I figured the rest of the aquarium would be the same. I was happily surprised to find tanks filled with almost all the familiar salt water hobbyist favorites (except a Moorish idol!) as well as weird things. We came across a number of fish that weren’t immediately identifiable. As usual the big boney fish freaked me right out and at first I didn’t want to go anywhere near them! But I forced myself… as I often do with things I’m afraid of. Some of the little tanks had real corals, unlike the plastic corals you saw in some of the larger tanks.

I got to see my first nautiluses! But they were in a tank with no flash photography and we just couldn’t get them… we also saw a fairly big octopus, a tank full of lion fish, some shrimp, and then we started getting into the different kinds of habitats. We walked into a rain forest exhibit and took all sorts of photos of the adorable poison dart frogs and a snake or two. They also had a rainforest room filled with plants you could walk through. I must admit it kinda smelled in there… but there was a pair of shy juvenile monkeys, a pair of Amazon parrots, some cute turtles, and a tarantula. Eventually I found my way to the giant winding shark tank. There were all sorts of sharks including two huge saw fish I couldn’t get a photo of because they were too close to the glass. Most were active and swimming around and like the rest of the aquarium they were being fed. I think I came at just the right time for this. I think my heart pitter-pattered when I spotted the baby hammerhead! It was just the cutest little fishy! Hammerhead sharks tan when they are in the sun which turns them from gray to black. This little guy was in the dark with no light at all and was just as pallid as I was – faux albino buddies! Forever!

I then wandered into the dolphin area. They were working with their trainers but there was no show due to the recent birth of a wee one (we didn’t see him or her.)

In the end I got to see a bunch of jelly fish tanks. They were eerily beautiful. I have been always a bit skittish of jellyfish… they also creep me out… but I was transfixed to these guys. Some of them looked like moving mushrooms. Others they put the light at the bottom of their tank so they’d swim against the floor and show their little tenticled backsides.

Did I forget to mention I saw some of the biggest, fattest, most bloated colorful starfish I have ever seen? They were absolutely grotesque!
I left having seen not only the best aquarium I have ever been to but also seeing the last surviving rescue ship to serve at Pearl Harbor. It was parked out front.

***I apologize for any missing photos and galleries as I continue to work getting Catching Marbles fully migrated to a new host. Please come back soon for restored photos and thank you for your patience!***

If you are enjoying Catching Marbles please consider adding a dollar or two to my limited gas money fund so I can continue going on adventures and sharing them with you! Thank you!

May 18, 2011 0

Mutter Museum – Philadelphia PA

I had a friend living in Pennsylvania who offered to show me around Philadelphia so I took her up on the offer. I got up early and drove to Philly where I found her text messaging me in front of the station. Traffic forced me away from her before I could yell out the window and I spent the next three rounds circling the block to regain contact. She jumped in and I set off to find parking, which was really easy.

Katherine had planned a visit to the Mutter Museum, which is a museum of biological oddities, originally intended to educate physicians-to-be. It’s not real obvious from the side walk but Katherine had been there before. We walked in, paid our admission, put on our little visitor tags and continued on. I had wanted to visit the Mutter Museum since I was 11 or 12 and saw a segment on TV about it. Here you could see a plaster death cast of the first famous Siamese twins, Chang and Ang (I’m hoping I remembered that right.) Also was their pickled uni-liver. Other things I had already known about was a ginormous bowel from someone who literally died of constipation, the skeleton of a giant and a dwarf, and a bunch of drawers full of things surgically removed from people who had swallowed them. Who knew safety pins and campaign buttons were that tasty! It said most specimens were extracted from people under fifteen years of age. Well let’s hope so! I can’t imagine at sixteen little Johnny’s friends are egging him on to eat big sweater buttons.

The museum was full of other things that were just as fascinating. There were skeletons of Siamese twins, all babies, the rib cage of a woman who warped her bones wearing a corset, many pickled babies with birth deformities. There were spines bent and fused at odd angles from people with kyphosis. That scared the hell out of me, having the condition myself I hope I don’t end up that way!

There were castings of things that could happen to your eyes… gruesome things… like a splinter to the eye, cancerous growths, extreme conjunctivitis. Even more horrifying was a collection of antiquated gynecological tools that would send any sane woman screaming for the hills and what I can only describe as a baby scooping spoon. They also had surgical tools, embalming tools, and a brain slicer, which looked disturbingly similar to a bagel slicer. One poor man had a cast done of his face with a weird horn-like growth jutting out of it. There was a skeleton of some poor teenager whose muscles and ligaments turned to bone and fused him in this horribly awkward position. Then there was the case full of skulls. I’m not sure what the intent of the display was but each skull had its ethnicity and manner of death labeled. We were horrified to find a thirteen year old who had committed suicide “after a discovered theft.” What kind of theft would warrant that reaction?! The wording to many of these were trite and outdated and in some ways even comical. One read, “Hydrocephalic imbecile.” Another read something like, “Attempted suicide, lived for 15 more years but was never cured of melancholy.” My favorite was, “At 70 attempted suicide, died 10 years later at age 80.” I wondered why attempt suicide at 70? Hell, he’d been lucky to live that long in the first place…. Still the bone structure was different depending on age and to some degree ethnicity. There weren’t many women, there were a lot of suicides, one murder, several executed prisoners, really the people whose bodies were not cared for after death during the time.

I saw just how much the human body can put up with… bones broken and fused in awkward ways, a ninety pound ovarian tumor, bottles of tape worms, a skull and a femur suffering bullet wounds and the most shocking of all were the syphilitic skulls, one didn’t even have a face anymore, it was completely eaten away. How anyone could have lived that long with such a horrific condition I don’t know. At the end was a special exhibit, a soap mummy and a bunch of presidential stuff… including a presidential tumor! And a piece of John Wilkes Booth. Just a bit yucky…

Then there was an art exhibit… I mean how could you top the fetal dance macbres that were already in the display cases out with the actual human specimens? Well! There was a great deal for abstract art using wigs and old medical supplies and hypodermics… there was also a comic, in a brilliant pink, describing in vivid detail human menstruation. I couldn’t read it… quite frankly I don’t want to know my own cycles in quite so much detail… This was the entrance to the gift shop, which was a hoot. It was tiny but hilarious, a book case flaunting titles like, “1001 Ways You Can Die.” There were more poster, pens that looked like hypodermics, two-headed gingerbread men cookie cutters, and a bin full of germ-inspired plushies. A magnet found it’s way home with me, how could I not get a souvenir?

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May 17, 2011 0