The first time I went to the New York State Museum in Albany, NY, I was in third grade. I went in someone’s mom’s van (did minivans even exist back then?), full of excitement because we were on our way to see Dinosaurs Alive!, the blockbuster museum exhibition that featured less-than-lifesize, groggy, animatronic dinosaurs. I remember thinking that it was awesome. Things have improved in dinosaur-related entertainment since then (though they’re still lacking feathers) because this puppetry is so much cooler.
Anyway, the second time I went to the New York State Museum was in October of this year, because for the second year in a row, rain thwarted my hopes of doing something autumnal over my birthday weekend, such as apple picking or visiting a Hubble Space Telescope-themed corn maze (not even joking). The museum was a good and dry alternative, and I was somewhat tickled that I was the only native New Yorker among the four of us that went. Seeing various cool things about New York shows me that I do, after all, have some pride in my home, even if it seems like I’m always scheming to get back to the west coast.
Be thankful I got a new phone for my birthday, because this is the last batch of crappy iphone photos and I’ve upgraded to less crappy iphone photos. Anyway, New York has a great history of cephalopod fossils. There was this impressively huge slab of rock festooned with ammonites.
Those, of course, had to be represented in diorama form as well.
The most interesting fossil to me was one I’d never heard of before.Climactichnites is a trace fossil of what is believed to be the tracks from a large, slug-like animal. It may have even been a land-roaming creature because the other features of the rock bearing its fossils show signs that the sediment was terrestrial. The slab of rock with these fossils was also impressively large, and those were some pretty big critters that laid down those tracks.
I especially love how the mystery animal signage lends to a carnival sideshow feel to the exhibit.
The Shell and Mantle 