Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: Hall of Fossils, part 5

The exhibit ends with a presentation on all things Fossils.  It's really a tremendously instructive set of displays and artifacts.  To top it off, the museum as captured a handful of paleontologists and displays them in a facsimile of their natural habitat!  Guests can watch them as they work and collaborate with one another.

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: Hall of Fossil, part 4

Moving into the next section of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History's newly renovated Hall of Fossils moves us back in time to the Paleozoic Era.  A time before dinosaurs ruled the planet.  A time when the forest created the coal the fuels and is destroying our present age.  And from here the exhibit continues to a point where life first emerged in complex forms in the oceans.

 Conifer Forests And Fern Prairies

 Incredibly intricate fossils of coral life.

 Life Before The Herbivores

 Swamps Spread As Ice Sheets Increase 

& Tropics Dry As Ice Sheets Retreat

 Fossil rich veins of coal.

 A touchable model of a giant millipede.

 The skull of a prehistoric freshwater Shark.

 Oceans team with life in the Cambrian Explosion.

 The oldest known forms of complex life.

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: Hall of Fossils, part 3

The event that defined the beginning of the rise of Mammal-ascendancy is also the one that divides their presentation at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural Histories, Hall of Fossils: Deep Time exhibition.  66 million years ago the meteor that stuck near the present day, Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico sets the clock for the beginning of the next section focused on Dinosaurs and the world they reigned over.

 The skeleton of a T-Rex poised over the vanquished skeleton of a Triceratops.  Glare of the glass unfortunate and ubiquitous throughout the exhibit (and the museum, for that matter...)

"Floodplains Full of Life" time capsule.

Diorama details (above and below)

 Diplodocus, the long-necked wonder of the late Mesozoic Era.

Brachiosaurus, no slouch in the Dinosaur size department!

A juvenile Pachysaurus, a great reminder that the giants all started as something much smaller. 

 A prehistoric "etendre" captured in stone, graceful in death for the delight and wonder of creatures inconceivable to this ancient "dancer".

 A Stegosaurus, and early superstar of the Mesozoic Era.

 Wonders from the ancient oceans captured like photographs in sandstone.