Washington DC, Day 9, Oct 28, 2011

A Day at the Natural History Museum

After our day of rest, we were anxious to get back at it, being a tourist, that is.

First off, in the entrance lobby, is one of the Easter Islands Heads. He definitely has a personality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exciting news, I found some more relatives for my family tree.

Now this is one HUGE trilobite.  One of our vacations back in the late 80’s was to find some of these fossils in northern Utah.  We did find some (about 1” x 1.5”), or at least our son did, he was bored, so before he threw a rock, he looked at it, and he found quite a few.  I guess he who touches the most rocks finds the most fossils.

This is the bloom of a Crinoid, a water lily from 330 million years ago. This specimen was from Indiana and was about 4” tall.  In reading the above link, I find out they are not plants but similar to starfish, who knew!

I grew up on a farm in SE Ohio and would pick up segments of the stem along the cow paths, especially after a rain.  These segments were small flat circles with a hole in the middle, I had no idea they were crinoids, I thought they were fish backbones.

This lady is sorting small animal bones found in Haiti in 1920.  Most of the bones we saw were no larger than sewing pins.

Our next real treat was to visit the Live Butterfly Pavilion.

So many butterflies.  This is a Leopard Lacewing.

They loved Bob’s cap, he had three butterflies perched at one point.

Okay, okay time to move on.  What a fun area!!

“This is a real mummy” was the sign for this display.

Here we are both touching a piece of Mars, collected by Viking in 1976.

This is a mineral Rainbow of Colors.