Science Museum of Minnesota

For Christmas last year, Missy & Pete gave the kids a membership to the Science Museum of Minnesota.  It's a one-year membership that starts on our first use, well we went to the museum on July 5, meaning it's good until July 5, 2015.

 The trip started looking at some Pleistocene-aged fossils of mammoths and the like...

And if you're talking the Pleistocene, you have to look at the Giant Beaver (it almost became Minnesota's state fossil back in the '80's)...

The kids played around in the interactive exhibits for a while, here's Kieran and Lex trying to broadcast the news --- pretty sure it will not be Lex's career, if Kieran doesn't smile, it won't be his either...

But it didn't take long for Luke to point out why we were there....dinosaurs!  He wanted to see dinosaurs!  His current career plan has him 'digging dinosaur bones' in the future.  So off we went...

Some were large...

-  The special traveling exhibit is called 'Ultimate Dinosaurs' and is at the museum through the end of August.  It focuses on the evolution of dinosaurs that lived Gondwana (essentially, the continents of the southern hemisphere) and how they changed over time in comparison to dinosaurs living on Laurasia (essentially, the continents of the northern hemisphere).  Gondwana and Laurasia were fragments of the once much larger supercontinent of Pangea, both continued to fragment to the continents we know today through the action of plate tectonics....there, science... -

Some were small...

Some must have been really large...here's Luke and Kieran standing in front of a sauropods leg bones...

Lots of shapes and sizes...

Eventually, the museum compared the southern hemispheres therapods to North America's well-known therapod --- T-Rex.

We imagined that if your point of view was the same as the one shown below...it was the last thing you ever saw!

It's much safer now that they are extinct!

After leaving 'Ultimate Dinosaurs' we checked out a few more classic Cretaceous North American Dinosaurs, including Triceratops...

And while the kids were playing around changing the wave length, etc. of waves....we played around taking some different pictures using mirrors...

We didn't see the whole museum, after 4-5 hours the kids and adults were hungry so we left for lunch...the best part is we can go back to see the rest!