At the science center to do science

Originally posted to tumblr on April 16 2019. Reposted here for archiving of posts I want to keep.

Pictures from my birthday field trip to science center Heureka.

Trike hatchling!

live feed of rats playing basketball

 pastel light-up disembodied brains on a shelf! you’re supposed to take one and carry it with you at the brain stuff exhibit!

Skulls and sickle claws of Deinonychus antirrhopus and Velociraptor mongoliensis at the dinosaur exhibit

Velociraptor skull with info cards for it and Deinonychus. On the right is forelimb claw of Megaraptor namunhuaiquii.

Velociraptor mongoliensis skeleton

Animatronic Velociraptor mongoliensis and Protoceratops andrewsi

 Part of a looping educational film about dinosaurs, and about the fact that birds are dinosaurs

And on the left we see me, criticizing pronated wrists on the T. rex animatronic while wearing a Jurassic Park backpack

Though the animatronics in the dinosaur exhibit had some... obvious inaccuracies, I’m happy for the generation of kids who get to grow up having learned from the beginning that dinosaurs are not all extinct and live on as birds, and that many of the extinct ones, too, had feathers. And the artist who created the images on the species info screens did a wonderful job on the reconstructions.

Separate from the dino exhibit, there was a life-size Jurassic Park Velociraptor statue in the adjacent cafe, with a sign explaining that yes, this is what the animals in the movie looked like, but since then we’ve found out more, and know raptors didn’t actually look like that, and even that the JP Velociraptors were based on Deinonychus in any case.

The celebrity guest

A selfie with the digestive system, as you do

Also, more cool visuals from the brain exhibit:

It's me! I'm a cool visual!

A wild Bob Ross appears!