Australian Museum

It wasn’t particularly nice out last Friday (Sept. 21), so we decided to go to the Australian Museum. It isn’t that big, but we still didn’t have enough time to see everything. The exhibits we saw were interesting and well put together. We mainly spent our time in the skeleton exhibit, the bird and insect exhibit, and I spent an hour or so in the dinosaur exhibit. Along with the normal animal skeletons mounted around the room for the visitors to inspect, the people who built the skeleton exhibit clearly had some fun with their job:

Yeee-Haw!

Ahh, a nice evening at home with the pets.

The bird and insect exhibit is a large balcony to the skeleton exhibit with taxidermied Australian birds in the wall cases and Australian insects in the display cases around the interior railing of the room. Adrienne spent the majority of her time here, taking pictures and reading about the birds and insects. They had some spiders spin webs in little boxes to put on display which was pretty cool.

The dinosaur exhibit is fairly up to date and had some nice skeletons. It also had this great series of information about different time periods (click these to read the information about the period):

The late Triassic, ~225 million years ago. This is the first time period that they showed. The Earth is mostly one giant continent.

The Earth during the middle Jurassic ~175 million years ago.

The continents start becoming what we know of them today around 125 million years ago in the early Cretaceous.

Around 75 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous, there were apparently large seas cutting down the middle of the Americas, Africa, and Russia. The mass extinction event that killed the Dinosaurs happens about 10 millions years later at the end of the Cretaceous period.

Ah, Big Blue as we know her now. Wait, what’s that? There are still Dinosaurs?! That’s right, we think that some of today’s birds evolved from Dinosaurs like T-Rex and Velociraptor.

So next time you’re out an about and see a bird, think about this:

Dinosaurs probably had feathers…

… so when will the birds turn on us?

And by the way, Australia used to have a giant wombat (my backpack is there for scale). It was probably very goofy looking (this is a possible reconstruction).