Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: The Mesazoic Era in 3 Acts, 2 "Set In Stone" & 3: "Diorama Dino-mite"

 I've combined these two as the themes for these posts came to me after my visit and the images I've taken are thin on the concept after the Cenozoic Era.  However, for Act 2 "Set In Stone" I have a most extraordinary artifact.

Fossils, true fossils almost always depend upon the presence of bones.  Something essentially composed of minerals that can be replaced in the right conditions with other more resilient minerals and thus endure over millions of years.  The drawback to this is that MOST of life on this planet does not have a skeletal structure that is sufficiently hard enough to become a fossil.  In his book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" Bill Bryson makes several excellent assertions about the nature and reality of knowing our planet's prehistoric realities.  Here are some of my favorites:

1) Our very best estimates suggest that only one out of every 1,000,000,000 bones ever even becomes a fossil.

2) If the population of the United States is 330,000,000 people, and we each have 206 bones in our bodies, chances are that only 61 of all of our bones will ever even become a fossil.

3) 99.9+ percent of all living organisms simply decay upon dying, and even those who may take longer due to extenuating circumstances (think ritual burial) will be gone after 10 to 20 thousand years.

4) The chances that a bone fossilizes is even obscured by the chance that a human being will discover it.

So the fact that this roughly speaking 152,000,000 year old impression of a species of cephalopodia named Belemite Cephalopod, Aconthoteuthis speciosa, was discovered in the Solnhofen Formation located in present day Bavaria, in southern Germany is basically a fucking miracle!  If you're only going to have one (and the museum has many) artifact for your "Set In Stone" act, it ought to be this spectacular!

On the Dioramas of which there were only two...

We start with "Floodplains Full of Life"

Clearly the T-Rex has caught the scent and blurred motion of the Theropod offspring scurrying up the creek's muddy bank.  Is she lying in wait for a meal, or just rudely awoken from a nap in her muddy "nest"?  You get to decide.

The mother Hadrosaur is obviously aware of her presence.

Near her nest rests the skull of a triseratops.

Zero in on...wait for it...a turtle!

And if you linger and look close enough there's also a prehistoric woodpecker for your delight!

"Giant Shadows on the Landscape"

Safely kept behind glass in a museum space so full of neon and directional lighting, the glare on the glass can be really distracting...

The Allosaurus knows there's enough flesh on the old Stegosaurus to share with the smaller theropod.  The pair of ancient crocodilians hope they will also find a seat at this dinner "table."

A fitting way to say good-bye to this portion of the exhibition.