A Visit To the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Part I: Prehistoric North Carolina

Albertosaurus on the hunt. 

Over the summer, I took a trip to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCSM from here on in) in Raleigh. It's a big, beautiful museum with an awful lot to see, free admission, and a stellar museum shop. Since the museum's collections are quite extensive, I'm going to stick to the palaeontology parts as that's the general thrust of Noah's Ravens but I could always revisit the other collections I photographed - mainly animals, taxidermied and living - at some indeterminate future time. Of course, I said I would post pictures just after I visited, and that was back in July, so... maybe I shouldn't get ahead of myself.

All photographs were taken by me. Click to see them below the break...

A Visit To the McWane Science Center, Part II: Southern Sea Monsters

In the previous post, we took a look at the Alabama Dinosaurs exhibit at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. However, as you may remember from the last post, much of Alabama was underwater during the Cretaceous Period, submerged by a shallow seaway.

Notice how much of Alabama is submerged by a shallow seaway.
[image from Sampson et al, 2010, 'New Horned Dinosaurs from Utah Provide Evidence for
Intracontinental Dinosaur Endemism', under CC Attribution 2.5 Generic licence]

The warm waters of this shallow sea teemed with life, and after more than 75 million years, the fossil record of these marine organisms can be found in Alabama, with a diversity and richness far surpassing the state's known collection of dinosaur fossils from this time. McWane presents a sampling of this prehistoric marine life in the sister exhibit to Alabama Dinosaurs, fetchingly entitled Sea Monsters...

WARNING: Clicking the 'read more' link below without having this open in another tab is highly dangerous. Proceed at your own risk.

A Visit To the McWane Science Center, Part I: Dinosaurs of the Deep South

Sorry for the long absence. Hopefully there will be new content -- including art -- here soon.

Anyway, if you should ever find yourself in Birmingham, Alabama, as my family and I did last week, a day at the McWane Science Center is sure to prove a day well spent. McWane features a museum as well as an IMAX, and most of the exhibits are geared toward kid-friendly interactivity: there is a hall of physical-science based challenges, brain teasers, and the like, an aquarium featuring a shark and ray touch pool, and space for visiting exhibits, which at the time of our trip was hosting an interesting, interactive-heavy exhibit on the history toys and games over 20th and 21st centuries. Of course, as soon as we'd paid our admission, I dragged the family up a flight of stairs to get to what we all* came to see: the dinosaurs.

A nodosaur browses amongst the ferns as an Appalachiosaurus stalks behind it.
[photograph by the author]

*I

Smiley Smilodon

...Meow? [photo by the author]

If there is one animal that could be considered the living (or, ah, once-living) emblem of the Ice Age, that animal is undoubtedly the woolly mammoth. But second place is nothing to sneeze at, and second place is firmly defended by a pair of 20-centimetre-long canine teeth. Yes, in the popular imagination, the second-most iconic animal of the Ice Age is the ferocious sabretooth tiger.

It's rather shame that there's not really such a creature as a sabretooth tiger.

Welcome To the Museum

Welcome to Noah's Ravens, the blog where I'll explore the collections of the Beneski Museum of Natural History, the natural history collection at Massachusetts's Amherst College. It is also my current place of employment; I'm a first-year student at Amherst and work shifts as a museum docent and tour guide. As a hopeful future palaeontologist, it's basically a dream job made real.

Here on Noah's Ravens, I intend to take a closer look at some of the specimens in the Beneski's rather extensive collections, which include giant mammals of the Pleistocene, one of the world's largest assemblages of dinosaur tracks, and a lot of oreodonts. Seriously, there are loads of oreodonts.

The author, with the skull of one of the aforementioned oreodonts. 

I'm going to look for stories behind the fossils, to catch a glimpse of their often-interesting human histories as well as their natural histories. There will likely be diversions from the Beneski Museum as well, and maybe even slight dips into my personal life (natural history-related dips, of course). I do hope you'll find this blog interesting, and — if you don't already — come to share my fascination with the specimens that call this museum home.

— M

(PS — Wondering about the blog title? That'll need a post of its own...)