January 7 -- behemoths

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The 7th was kind of a weird day.  Many plans....

I went to the library and to the bread&milk grocery.  I put a ton of books on phones and tablets on reserve at the library, and some of them came in on Saturday after we were there.  So an extra trip was needed -- if I waited until Saturday, I the books that came in last Saturday wouldn't have been available to me.  And we were nearly out of milk.....

Then my better half had an eye appointment.   Just a regular check-up, but they would be dilating his eyes, so he shouldn't drive home.  I drove him downtown.  We collected the parking ticket, so he could get it validated in the eye clinic (special parking just for people with medical appointments!), and I went to the University's natural history museum, which is very close to health service.

A model of T. rex.

T. rex skull.  You can just see the model pictured above, over the front of the lower jaw of the skull.

Remember how we have talked about how reptiles have undifferentiated teeth?  (All teeth in the mouth of the same shape; doing the same job.).  Note teeth, we will come back to this over the next day or two.



I was surprised to see this graphic that shows the elephant not-that-much-smaller than the T. rex.  Maybe that's a really big elephant........

Speaking of elephants.....  Very near the T. rex skull in the museum are a mammoth and a mastodon.  The mammoth is on the left....

Here are the "to the right" lists it talks about above.

I'm reading the above thinking "Yeah, right -- how often do random people get to see the TEETH of those giant skeletons!  'Easy' for paleontologists, but for the rest of us, who can't see the teeth, 8' above us, in a darkened paleontology hall???'"

An interesting thought, that teeth are the "easiest" way to tell them apart, but........... 

Also interesting that one chewed side to side, and the other front to back!  It seems like their whole jaw attachment must have been totally different?!?  I didn't look carefully to see if there was info about that -- there's something I can look for on my next visit........

(That's the back of the mammoth's hind foot, above its tooth.....)

It's not a very big museum, and things get fitted in where there seems to be room.  Back and forth through time, from dinos to elephantine mammals, back to dinos........

We've looked at this model of an allosaurus's head in previous trips to the museum.

This blew me away -- I took pics of this before, and totally missed that a) the head was so narrow!, and b) the other half of the head is naked "bone" while this side is fully-fleshed and covered in scales?  How did I not notice this before?

There's always something new to see in a museum, even when it's something that I *could* have seen before, had I taken the proper viewpoint!

Note, again, the undifferentiated teeth.  Notice how much narrower the skull is than the T. rex above!  I wonder why.....

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