today i visited the famous australian museum. i met up with my aussie friends courtney & kate and it was a day of fun.. i have been wanting to visit the museum ever since i saw "when mammoths roamed," posters that float around the city. in 7th grade, while on a youth trip, we stopped in a town with a similar set up to Boot Hill, and in one of the shops a fossil of a mammoth tusk was on display. It was a novelty to the town and I have been interested in the prehistoric, peaceful beasts, ever since.
thigh bone (femur) of a mammoth! 
huge mammoth skeleton.some interesting things i learned about mammoths:
- they are NOT prehistoric elephants! they are wayyy cooler than elephants. (they are cousins to the
elephant, as donkeys are to horses).
- their bodies are different than elephants to help adapt to the cold weather they lived in.
- they had small ears to help reduced heat escape, small little tails to prevent heat loss, and even an
anal covering. (weird, i know, but i was fascinated ☺ ).
- they have 2 flares on the ends of their trunks (above & below nostrils) verses the asian elephant,
which has one above, and the african elephant which has none.
cute baby wooly (notice the tip of its trunk)- they chewed their food by grinding their back teeth forward then back.
- bones found mostly in France but, also Spain and the US.
- they are cute and furry and i wish they weren’t extinct. ☺
after we visited the mammoth exhibit, it was on to the dinosaurs!
i have been fascinated with dinos ever since i had an epiphany my junior year of high school when i realized i had never seen real dinosaur bones. i have, however, now 3 times. once was on my weekend visit to OC, my senior year of high school and the other i can’t remember but, i have NEVER seen anything like this exhibit. it was ab.so.lutely AMAZING! i learned so much about dinosaurs too. most of the dino bones on exhibit are fake and from the "Cretaceous.” era. this is the era after the Triassic and the Jurassic eras. this would be around the time that people and other animals were starting to pop up, before the Ice Age. anyway, if you thought the TRex was the largest dinosaur, you would be wrong. It is actually the Giganotosaurus!! it was… GIGANTIC! i can’t even begin to explain how awesome this creature was. it’s a good thing humans were not around because, they would have quickly disappeared if they had been. Forget the flood, God should’ve just dropped dinosaurs to do the dirty work.. ☺
picture does NOT do it justice. interesting fact about the Giganotosaurus:
- discovered in 1995, in Argentina.
- used the 'bite & slice' method when eating prey
- ate the equivalent of 150 steaks a day..
the next exhibit we visited was the “Surviving Australia” exhibit, which contained all the scary animals that once roamed, and some that still roam, this great land down under. my favorite was the “Demon Duck of Doom,” other wise known as the wombat! which is nowhere NEAR a duck! silly aboriginals. there were also some really large, furry animals of which i didn’t catch the names of them but, let’s just say, it’s a good thing they were stuffed ..
right after that we were lead into a room full of skeletons! this was a veryy cool exhibit. it was case after case of skeletons of every animal group. my favorites were:
lion
horseman & his horse
when i pedaled the bike, so did the skeleton :)
after that, we went to the room of “Birds of Australia.” it was room with glass cases of stuffed birds, big to small. colorful or dull.
we didn't spend too long in the room. it was a bit creepy walking around staring at stuffed birds.
outside the room was a 7 meter crocodile in a case with some snakes from australia. snakes up to 10 meters. in english that is 15 ft and almost 21 ft!!! they were so scary to look at, even in a case.
me stanching an emu :) overall, I had a truly amazing time and i would like to have a night at the museum there. it would be epic.
xoxox
dustialynn
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