T-Rex Tweetup
Last night, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science held a special after-hours event for a limited number of their Twitter followers. We were invited to tour their T.Rex Encounter exhibit, which includes a cast replica of the famous tyrannosaurus specimen known as "Sue".
Sue is the oldest-aged (28 at the time of death) and most complete specimen of Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found. Showing signs of numerous healed injuries attained throughout its life, paleontologists don't know if it was truly a "she" (it was named for its discoverer Susan Kendrickson, who found it while her colleagues were repairing a flat tire). After a lengthy custody battle (which involved an actual raid by the FBI and National Guard), Sue was auctioned off to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where it is displayed today. But this cast is part of a traveling exhibit that will be on display at DMNS until January 8.
In addition to the Sue skeleton, they also have a number of robotic dinosaurs on display.
"Eep... eep... eep..."
These dinos had some interesting technical features I hadn't seen before. With sensors in their heads, they are able to "see" you and follow your movements. Especially creepy with that evil little Saurornitholestes. TV screens overhead displayed what they see (notice the Triceratops is kind of wall-eyed).
But the fun didn't end there! Curator Joe Sertich took us backstage, where they've been cleaning fossils from the recent Snowmass excavation. For those who don't know, it was a big story last year. Snowmass is a ski town in Colorado. The city was preparing to build a reservoir, but workers started finding mammoth and mastodon bones-a huge repository of them, as it turns out. During 2010 and 2011, teams from the Museum collected thousands of fossils from about 20 species, including camels, bison, and a rare occurrence of mammoths and mastodons in the same locale (although I still find it hard to tell the difference between the two).
They collected so much, it's fairly overwhelmed their storage space. And unlike most fossils, where minerals have seeped in and replaced the original biological tissue, these are the actual bones of the animals. Where cleaning is usually a detailed, painstaking process... in this case, it basically involves rinsing off the dirt.
I can't help but to feel a little sad sometimes when I visit this place, and it reminds me of the career I left behind. But there is so much here to explore, and experience, and I just feel... elevated. Sometimes I wish I could have been born and spent my whole life in Colorado. It didn't turn out that way, but I got here as soon as I could!
