Having established that my daughter is a wannabe paleontologist, I took her today to the Mesa Southwest Museum.
It’s been several years since I’ve been there and they’ve made significant renovations, including a permanent dinosaur exhibition. They had a small exhibition before and I wasn’t sure what to expect.
The permanent exhibition is quite nice, and Michelle and I enjoyed it. My main complaint was that skeletons were, in many case, poorly labeled. In many cases, the name was not clearly displayed and the descriptive text needed to be read through to find the name. While that’s not too bad, it’s not terribly convenient when you’ve got a three-year old standing there saying, “What’s this dinosaur, daddy? What’s this dinosaur?”
In one or two of the cases, there appeared to be no sign at all. That’s something they need to work on.
One section is called dinosaur mountain, and it has a series of animatronic dinosaurs. What surprised me was that Michelle was actually afraid of them. She can watch dinosaurs tearing each other up all day long on Walking With Dinosaurs but when confronted with very unrealistic ones she was nervous. Fortunately, I was able to assure her that they were nothing to be afraid of.
The museum is also hosting a traveling exhibit called When Crocodiles Ruled put together by Science Museum of Minnesota.
I wasn’t too impressed by the Crocodile exhibit, but it was aimed, I’d guess at elementary school-aged children. The “science” exhibits had too much reading to keep Michelle’s attention, and there weren’t enough fossils.
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