Let me preface this post by telling you that when I was little, I had two basic passions in life: rocks and dinosaurs. It's a love that still lives on today. I've used dinosaurs in at least three of my art classes so far, and for the longest time you would not find me without a small, pleasing to the touch, rock in my pocket. So you can imagine how much in awe I was when I visited the Natural History Museum, and this was one of the first exhibits I saw:
The stegosaurus was always my second favorite dinosaur, because how could anything be better than the brontosaurus? (Even if it is a junior synonym for apatosaurus, brontosaurus is the favored term amongst most people I know, because we grew up with it. Also, it seems easier and more pleasing to say.) One of these days, I'll find my way to a museum that has a brontosaurus skeleton on display.
When I saw this next creature, my first thought was that it was a wampa from The Empire Strikes Back.
No, that's not the creature I saw, that's the wampa. This is the skeleton on display:
It's a giant ground sloth. They're extinct, so you have no worries about being able to reach your lightsaber to defend yourself from it.
Not all the animals I saw were dead, though. There was a very colorful exhibit of tropical fish. I wish I'd had a clicker to count how many people made Finding Nemo references when they saw this.
I took so many photos of rocks/gems/minerals that it was hard to decide what to include here, so I pulled out only the very best one.
A spectrum of rocks. Glorious to behold, isn't it? I think so, anyway. From there, I moved on to what is possibly one of the most famous gems in the world, the Hope diamond. You hear stories about how big it is, and how pretty, but I was vastly underwhelmed by it.
I was expecting something more along the lines of the Koh-i-Noor as seen in the Doctor Who episode "Tooth and Claw":
You can see in comparison why I was not impressed. What did impress me, though, was this perfect chunk of quartz which formed the largest crystal ball I've ever seen:
Perhaps the greatest lure of the Museum of Natural History, though, is the butterfly pavilion, which is free on Tuesdays. It's basically a sort of indoor greenhouse, filled with flowers and butterflies. You are assigned a specific time, and are allowed to stroll through and linger as you wish, watching the butterflies. Please don't touch them, though. The same rule doesn't apply to the butterflies, probably because they don't speak a human language, and they are allowed to touch you. These guys stayed on my shorts for probably half an hour. You can even see the proboscis of the closer one.
And one lovely Monarch decided to grace me with its presence as well. Hello there!
Next time we'll visit the National Zoo and the National Air & Space Museum.
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