Natural History Museum of Utah

Yesterday we went to the Natural History Museum of Utah and learned about, well, natural history!  First we saw the exhibit on horses on the third floor, on the way there we walked through a hallway that had different minerals.  Among the rocks we saw amazonite, amethyst, opal, diamond, pumice, and quartzite.  Griffin like the blue of the opal.  When we got to the horses we learned tons of stuff about them, such as, they are measured to their wither not the top of their head, a wither is a spot on their back and they are measured in "hands".  We saw an animation of food going through their whole body. We saw a display of ancient fighting horses and one had metallic black armor which was awesome. There were models of villages that ate only horse meat, and we saw horse fossils that came from that town.

Quartzite

Next we went across a short bridge to the Native American section where we learned about different ways to weave baskets.  We saw clay pots, arrowheads and stone tools.  Some of the clay had red and orange designs.  There were arrowheads made out of different types of stone and some were made out of bone.  My favorite thing was looking at the different shapes of arrowheads.

Tarantula

After that we went to the animal and insect zone and we got to look at the different ecosystems of Utah. There was the desert, the alpine, the salt flats, and the forests and meadows.  The coolest one was the desert because it had a rattlesnake, a kangaroo rat, a burrowing owl, some lizards, some cacti, and a bat.  Did you know that rattlesnakes are losing their rattles because of a genetic defect.  Usually when people hear a rattlesnake they kill it so that rattlesnake may not reproduce.  Rattlesnakes with atrophied tails are quieter, less likely to be killed, and will pass on their genetic traits.  Right next to that was all the bugs and smaller animals like mice, snakes, shrews, and voles.  They had a big brown and hair tarantula and a harvester ant colony.  You could see they ants digging new holes and storing their food.  Sometimes they would get stuck and they'd try to struggle free of the sand.

Next we went down to the dinosaur exhibit we saw fossils and life sized fake dinosaurs.  The brontosaurus is over 150 feet long!  My favorite was the forty foot long crocodile.  It was probably 5ft tall and ten ft wide and its head was huge, me and my brother could've fit inside it's mouth.  We got to look at brine shrimp and a miniature sculpture of salt lake city and we could raise and lower the water levels to show where the water is today and where it was a really really long time ago.

After that we had to go home because it was my dad's birthday and we had friends coming over for dinner.  See you later!