in which i was in total geek mode

last night my dad and i went to our first member's night at the field museum. it beyond rocked. we got to see the newly remodeled dinosaur hall (where they now have a full parasauropholus skeleton!) and the new trip-through-geologic-time-exhibit "evolving planet." They had this awesome video (almost more like a screen-saver) with anomalocaris and other cambrian creatures swimming back and forth across 3 large screens.

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Then we wandered up to the 3rd level and cruised the halls of the geology and anthropology departments. Some of the labs and offices were open with individual exhibits set out. There was also an enormous library with over 250,000 volumes, including a room of 7,000 or so that date back to the 1400s. inside a glass case in the library was a set of darwin's letters.

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The 4th floor is for exhibit preparation - where they make all the scenery, where they turn dino skeletons into the life-like 3-d models, and where all the artists work that do all the design.

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We then headed 2 stories below the main floor to where all the labs are. A siberian tiger had recently died at brookfield zoo and they were dissecting it for everyone to see. We also stopped at a table where a lady was cleaning a large skull.

"Is that a giraffe?" i asked.

"yup, from brookfield"

"Is that the one that died last last year?"

"Yes, he died in october"

"I fed that giraffe last year!!!"

things come full circle in weird ways sometimes.

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Last stop was the rock collection. 12 rows of 24 cases (about 3 feet wide) of rocks. nothin' but rocks. What you could see in there was the stuff too big to go in the cabinets - large pieces of sandstone with ripple marks, stalagtites, and a conglomerate with a matrix of concentric rings of quartz and gold (as the rock cooler the gold deposited in a cm thick ring around the original rock pieces and quartz filled in the rest).

let's just say, it rocked.