This post has a lot of pictures but I'm just too excited to leave anything out!
It's really hard to find a complete skeleton but 80% of the skull of this triceritops was found in fairly decent shape!
Classic T-rex
Cool fossil!!
We got to have a backstage tour before we went through the museum. This is a guy working on polishing a leg bone.
A very large (and heavy) femur bone.
This is a bone that hasn't been cut out of the plaster cast yet.
Skulls!
These are turtle shells. The one in the top right corner was the biggest known Jurassic turtle shell. The guy giving us the tour found the big one on the left and gets to name it!
This sign is above the men's bathroom. :)
This is a large fish...whoever catches this at the Southwick reunion definately would be the winner!
Prehistoric aligators
Spiny Dino!
This museum is way cool for kids! Lots of hands on activities!
This museum is way cool for kids! Lots of hands on activities!
A sideways picture of me compared to the leg of the long neck dinosaur.
This is a very big turtle! Way bigger than my turtles!
This is a very big turtle! Way bigger than my turtles!
Really well preserved fish by a plant.
Mammoth! There was some mammoth hair on display too.
Remember the movie Ice Age? There are some cave drawings of the homosapians killing mammoths. Well, in this display there were 3-4 humans with spears on the left side, one underneath spearing his rib cage, one on the rock pile trying to throw a boulder at the mammoth, and one being squished by the foot of the mammoth. It made us all laugh!
That night we stayed on the Little Sahera Sand Dunes. The dunes are remains from Lake Bonneville that covered most of Utah 12,000 years ago. The Great Salt Lake and Severe Lake are remains of Lake Bonneville.
Tents on the windy dunes!
The next morning we got up with the sun and went to go trilobite hunting. This was a huge pile of rocks that we had to split open with a hammer and pray not to break the little fossils. My dad told me that Alex knows all about Trilobites! If he had bigger muscles he would love this place!
My hammer. If you look closely at the rock there is a trilobite next to the hammer. This was the first one I found.
The Weeke's Formation- These rocks formed 165 Million Years Ago. It was here that we saw some things that professional geologists have only read about in textbooks and papers. Cool!
Cactus!
The second night we pitched our tents at a geology campsite by Fossil Mountain. We woke up and found a couple scorpions in our campsite..."shudder" It was fun to watch the boys catch them and put them together to make them fight.
Cooking breakfast.
Fossil Mountain. It didn't look that far from the vans. Then we started walking. Three miles later we saw...
...this. If you blow up this picture you can see two white dots in about the center of the picture. Those are our vans.
Looking up at fossil mountain. (Named for an obvious reason. Just hiking up the mountain you find fossils everywhere!)
And we found a bull snake and the ground was covered with tarantula holes.
Next stop was the playa lake. (Also remains of Lake Bonneville) Nothing but mudcracks for miles! Our teacher told us that sometimes the vans get to race antelope at 60 miles per hour!
We gathered at the man made wildlife resevoir to look at our oldest ancestor...
...Cyanobacteria! This is the first organism that lived on the earth. It performs photosynthesis releasing oxygen into the air which aided the growth of other life.
This is Tom getting close and personal with his past.
The Spring 2010 Geology 112 Class
We love rocks!
