National Museum of Natural History

The National Museum of Natural History is a mere two blocks from my apartment. I dropped into it sporadically for short visits; science museums aren't really my thing. It's exactly as I remember: filled with fossils and skeletons and more oh my! It covers land, sea, and sky. The fossils are neat and often impressive though not something that I want to stare at for long or read much about.

Sometimes I took pictures on these visits.

One Tuesday when my parents were in town we visited the live butterfly pavilion. (We picked Tuesday because entry is free on Tuesdays.) It was great! See the pictures. The pavilion contains many species of butterflies, no two alike. They have exquisite patterns, all works of art. "I love it," said my mom. "Wonderful." I like the fact that they have to check you for butterflies before you leave--sometimes the butterflies hitch a ride on your clothing or your hat without you knowing it.

Also during this visit we stopped by the special exhibit More Than Meets The Eye on visualizing things that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

We also explored part of (before we ran out of time) the engrossing special exhibit Written in Bone on making anthropologic inferences from bones. It focused mainly on bones found in the Chesapeake Bay region. The exhibit showed how bones can indicate what profession people were (tailor, shoemaker, etc.). It also discussed how bones can show the difference between the upper and lower classes. For instance, upper class people had worse teeth (because they could eat more sugar) and upper class people more often had lead poisoning (because they used metal utensils, often lead, while the lower classes used wooden ones). I guess it's sometimes better to be a member of the lower classes.

I learned what bones are more useful for identification and how anthropologists read them.

The exhibit also showed examples of how bones look after different types of injuries, and how the results depends on whether the damage occurred before, at, or after death. It's fascinating but also a bit disturbing seeing how bones can change in response to normal harms like osteoporosis, lack of exercise, etc.

Elsewhere, the gemstone/jewelry collection is incredible. So pretty!

The Evolving Universe special exhibit showed awesome pictures of nebulas and galaxies.

The special exhibit on 2011 award-winning nature photograph was pretty amazing. Some photography makes it incredibly easy to anthropomorphize animals. Also, many landscape scenes are majestic, especially the winner in the Plant Life category. You can view it and all the photographs. Of course, the feeling is different when the photos are shown as prints the size of posters.

One special exhibit, Titanoboa, simply showed a model of a recently-discovered giant snake. The model is of a 48-foot-long snake eating a crocodile! And this is all based on fossil evidence and hypotheses. The exhibit consisted mainly of informative signs explaining what they've inferred about the snake.