Gotta Love the Platypus

Over their protests, I took my offspring to the Natural History Museum in Lawrence. Once we were there, they had fun despite it not being YouTube.



Obviously I took a lot of pictures. So did Mo with her camera, and as usual the majority of the pictures are blurry and curiously composed. I made a video of them to kind of distill the essence of Motography.

Mo's Camera at the Natural History Museum from Chixulub on Vimeo.

What is believable? Jackalopes? Would a Jackalope be any weirder than the duck billed platypus this one shares a display with?

I saw where the elephant bird (the enormous egg pictured below) may have been extant as recently as 1000 years ago. I wonder if there might have been a few stray mosasaurs when man first took to sailing the seas. Would be a a notable sea monster if so.
I am not the eggman or the walrus. I am the lobster. Coo coo cachoo.
You see, a virus is what we doctors call very, very small. This model, however, is bigger than a medicine ball. It's the HIV retrovirus, actually.




Now that's what I call a dead parrot. The Monty Python just keeps coming, doesn't it?


Here we have the clever illustration of just how many bugs there are. Number of species of animals were about five inches in a tube. Plants were more plentiful, maybe a foot or so. The insects go literally through the roof.


Elephant Bird eggs: when you need to make an omelet for 45 people.






I don't think this is what they meant by 'save the manatee.'

After the museum we checked out the Bedazzler, an installation that went in since our visit a year ago. Very cool, a sculpture of sapplings twisted around a couple of trees. At first I thought I was noticing something I'd obtusely missed on previous visits, but reading the sign in front of it, at most there were a few sticks in the ground last I was there.





We also drove by the house I lived in until I was almost five years old (in Baldwin) on the way back. Also my would-have-been-inheritance, the site of Pot-Pourri Pizza, a joint my Dad started with a couple of friends before I was born. If they'd opened up in Johnson County they'd have likely become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Or if they'd opened in Baldwin twenty years later when pizza was an American staple.