October 12 -- dino excellence

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Now here's something I'd never done before.  The Ann Arbor District Library is wandering afield from print publications.  They have all sorts of musical performance tools, for example.  I don't know what, exactly, but I've seen the cases waiting to be checked out.

They also have dino kits!

I was surprised to be offered this enormous bag when it was my turn to have kit "Tyrannosaurus rex 1"!  It's not heavy, but it's bulky, and comes as a wheely bag.

Here's what we see when we open the bag -- a book, and some other interesting things, carefully protected in labeled, padded pockets. 

Small foot claw.  !!!

??

!!!

A really high-quality plastic model.  Look at the detail!  (I think the arms shown are way too big, though, remembering the T. rex arm bones we saw in Dino 101......)

In the next pocket is a cast of a T. rex brain.  (In some cases a fossilized skull leaves a space where the brain would have been, so they know what size and shape the brain would have been.)

Look at my hand, above and below...................  Think about the size of the tooth, relative to the size of the brain...............   (Dinos grew new teeth, and shed old teeth, throughout their lifetimes, pretty much like sharks do now.  MANY dino teeth are found without roots -- which shows they were shed rather than part of an animal at the time it died.  The root here means that the tooth from which this cast was made was part of the T. rex when it died.)

This cast is detailed enough that I could feel the serrations on the cutting edge of the tooth........  !!!

Last but not least, here is that "small claw."

Tooth and brain, on the rug (sorry about the distracting shadows....).

Tooth, brain, beagle(ish sort of guy).  He says we are usurping his sunshine with our silly plastic stuff.

The book in the T. rex 1 kit was this one -- a real feast for the eyes.  I didn't read it (I only had the kit for a week, and it was a busy week), but I enjoyed the pics.  The pic on the cover of the book (you'll see it if you click through) shows what I expect are much more realistically-sized T. rex arms than those on the model in this kit..............  Really, really teeny arms, compared to the size of the critter..............

The kit also contained a DVD, which talked about how young dinos may have looked enough different from their parents that we have mistaken them for different species.  It speculated that we may have mistaken youngsters and adults for different species often enough to account for about a third of what we now think are "known species."  Interesting.



It was only when I was packing the goodies back into the bag that I noticed the model's mouth opens!  Alas, I apparently failed to set the camera back to micro focus, so this is blurry.

But we can get the idea!

The library has several more dino kits -- I'm going to be checking all of them out!

How cool, to get to hold "teeth" and "brains" and examine them "up close and personal"!!!!




The evening of 12th we tried a new-to-us restaurant.  We hadn't realized it would be full of tvs, blaring sports, and little kids.  Not qualities of places where they concentrate on the food....

It was edible.



The sky was excellent..............

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