ideonexus

Category: Adventuring

  • North Carolina Museum of Natural Science: Tropical Connections and Mountain Cove Forest

    Two short sets this week, two big sets coming over the next two weeks. Mountain Cove Forest Inside the NCMoNS is one great big recreation of a forest, filled with taxidermied animals. The Mountain Cove Forest was the last of these. I prefer live animals to dead ones, but this was definately one of the…

  • Prehistoric North Carolina

    Fossil-hunters once pulled only bones out of the dirt. Then they started pulling up whole skeletons as one big rock, using X-rays and MRIs to catch images of the organs of dinosaurs in the rock. Then they started examining pollen particles accompanying the fossilized bones. I wonder what important evidence we are destroying today, when…

  • North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: Underground

    Hiddenite crystal with card Mr. William Earl Hidden, July 24, 1905 This antique was my favorite object on display in the Museum’s “Underground” exhibit. A card from William Hidden (1853-1918), a mineralogist sent to North Carolina by Thomas Edison to look for platinum, and for whom the gem is named. See the complete flickr set…

  • NC Museum of Natural History: Mountains to the Sea

    Wildlife-Friendly Backyard At the museum’s center is a huge recreation of North Carolina’s many ecosystems, filled with both living and taxidermied animals. One of my favorite side displays was on how to build an eco-friendly yard that invites, feeds, and shelter’s wildlife. The Four Fundamentals of Wildlife-Friendly Landscapes: Offer a year-round food supply along with…

  • North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: Nature’s Explorers

    Fish Specimens in Jars I have a morbid fascination with animals preserved in jars, and that’s what drew me into the Natures Explorers exhibit; however, it was not the Cabinet of Curiosities I expected to find. Instead, I met with an exhibit about the lives of those who assemble such cabinets and the history behind…

  • The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: Costal North Carolina

    The most impressive thing about the Coastal NC Exhibit are all the whale skeletons hanging overhead as you walk through the exhibit, animals larger than anything Earth has ever seen before, descendents of cow-like animals that once lived on land, some of which still have their hip bones still floating inside them, serving no other…

  • The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: NC’s Natural Treasures

    Pileated Woodpecker The centerpiece of the NCMNS’ first floor is a room filled with displays of taxidermied animals living in North Carolina, many of which are endangered, and one on display, the Carolina Parakeet, only parrot indigenous to the United States, is extinct. The display impresses on us the wealth of biodiversity all around us,…

  • Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History: Hall of Gems

    Hope Diamond The Hall of Gems reminded me of this quote from Henry David Thoreau: “When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was…

  • Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History: Hall of Fossils

    The Hall of Fossils Trilobite Growth Cycle Walking through the Hall of Fossils is walking through time, from the earliest rocks to modern humans, the extensive collection of original fossils and cast skeletons either makes creationists very silly or god very deceptive. You can view the complete flickr set here.

  • The National Zoological Park, Reptiles, and Invertebrates, and Brains, oh my!

    The Invertebrate Exhibit Giant Hermit Crab Awesome moment at this exhibit was getting to see one of Zoo staff feeding the Pacific Octopus. It ballooned up from a little white ball into a red explosion of tentacles. The Zookeeper fed it a muscle and a hermit crab, and had to fight octopus a bit to…

  • The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum

    French Astrolabe, 1600s The Hubble Telescope was impressive. For some reason, I’d never realized how huge this orbiting eye on the Universe actually is, easily three-stories tall. Scale was a common theme for me throughout the museum. The walk-through size of Skylab, the claustrophobia-inducing interior of the cramped Mercury capsule. These pictures won’t fully communicate…

  • The Smithsonian Natural History Museum

    I’ve got a huge backlog of photos I need to get up on Flickr, enough to cover several months worth of Saturndays. Here’s two sets from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum: Hall of Bones Man and the Manlike Apes The Hall of Bones does a great job of illustrating the incredible biological and adaptation diversity…