A Bonus Adventure!

My excuse was the same every time I was asked why I hadn't been to the museum affiliated with Ashfall yet. "It's a three hour drive and I don't have a good way to spend the night somewhere. That would be a really long day trip for me on one of my days off, and normally I don't get up early enough to do that."

But this week, well, this week my body betrayed its pattern and I was up, moving, and ready to go somewhere, anywhere, before 9. I had time to make the commute to Lincoln. So off I went, armed with lunch, a confused GPS, and a camera.

So Lincoln is one of the closest "large cities" that the rest of the world would probably actually qualify as a, well, city, as opposed to the little towns that I'm used to around here. The reason for this likely has something to do with it being the home of an airport and fairly large college. That college also happens to be the one that runs the science side of Ashfall, as well as the source of our paychecks (the museum also just feels like it's been built into a college building. Which it basically is that...) By all rights I should've already made this trip at least once. But hey, better late than never. But then... who really wants to spend a day trying to find parking in the city?

Since this was a trip taken on my day off, I had to constantly remind myself that I was off duty for the day. This included when I heard a mom tell her children that a stuffed elephant (modern and not a skeleton) was a dinosaur as she ignored another one climbing up on the railing to touch a mastodon tusk. Or try to. He was too short.

Nope. I was off duty. As hard as it was, I really, really needed that time to breath. And to be completely honest, when you're greated by two parallel lines of proboscidae fossils marching toward you, it's actually not a terribly hard thing to do to forget that you're supposed to be enjoying yourself.

For example, I was excited to finally be able to see what mammoth teeth look like in different stages in their lives. I know that they are different, but I've never had the chance to learn how. There are six sets of four teeth. 7 were shown in the case so that a very old, worn down mammoth tooth can be shown. Normally animals don't survive until they get that old in the wild, so these are less common, but they do sometimes make it.

"Daddy, where is the trunk?" I heard one little girl say behind me. I had to smile. At this point I had moved on to reading an ancient myth about how the elephants nose got so long. Apparently it involved a tug-of-war match with an alligator. Good story, but in reality it was more of a make-over for a changing environment.

If the elephants aren't enough of a reminder that you should relax, learn, and enjoy yourself for the day, this guy should do the trick.

Meet Titanoboa, the largest snake to ever walk... um... no.... roam the earth. Don't worry. He probably won't be interested in eating you, that's a crocodylamorph hanging out of his mouth. Yum.

Titanoboa was alive around 60 million years ago and only for a period of about 2 million years. This was right after the death of the dinosaurs. Although very few bones of his were found, those that were were enough to tell which snake this guy was the most closely related to, figure out where the bones came from in the snake, and from there estimate the size. He was about two feet around and 48 feet long! That vertebrae is maybe the size of my hand!

At first paleontologists thought they had a different kind of large reptile. Then they showed it to a snake specialist, and Titanoboa was born. Or.... brought back, anyway.

While I'm on the topic of Titanoboa, let's rewind about five million years. Behold, the only dinosaur fossils discovered in Nebraska! Well, these and some tracks. But that's about it. Keep in mind that most of the state was underwater, and the tiny bit that wasn't at the very end of the Cretaceous was tropical. Which meant acidic soil, which meant not much really got preserved.

See it? Got it? Good. Let's go back to the fossils that Nebraska actually has a fair amount of.

This isn't to say that there are no Mesozoic fossils here. It's just that they're mostly marine. For example, there were mososaurs, plesiosaurs, sharks.... you get the idea.

As I continued exploring, I came across some stuff that was just interesting. I found the small Smilodon that was allegedly traded for one of the large rhinos back in the days when museums wheeled and dealed in real fossils instead of casts. There was the deer with a baby inside her, a burrowing beaver with aapretty decent sized burrow behind him, and a camel with some bite marks on him from a site where an entire herd of giant camels got caught in quicksand, and enough other stuff that I took over 300 pictures in a one day. I even came across the kid's dig that they have, which has a little guy surprisingly similar to our baby rhino, Justin.

So many pictures, and I wasn't done yet for the day.

About the time I ran into Smilodon, I almost collided with an employee of the museum that I had met at Ashfall two days prior. Once we recognized each other (apparently when you take someone out of the context you know them in, that gets a little tricky...), she offered to show me the museum's collections after the meeting that she was rushing to. Apparently, my eyes lit up at the idea.

While Morril hall itself isn't exactly big enough for anyone to really get lost in, collections is a completely different story. All I saw was the vertebrate paleontology bit, and there were around five rooms dedicated to such. Plus there was off site storage and five other departments. There were about half a dozen rooms, not including a decent size lab, and just to give you an idea, one of those rooms is dedicated entirely to Ashfall specimens from the 70's.

Chewed up bone.

Yes. It's a little ridiculous. But it was a really good opportunity to talk to someone further about the pathology and aging of these animals. You can tell so much just from the teeth! If you want to know the age, you look at the first molar because that is the first tooth to come in and will be the one to show the most wear, but you also look to see if all 6 teeth are there. You can also use that information to figure out which part of a partial jaw you have; the last molar is 3-lobed in some animals. Some horses even have an extra little tooth in the back, but that tends to fall out. Baby teeth are different because the root is deeper than that of a permanent tooth. And then there's the changes in the teeth caused by wear and tear. A lot of the rhino and horse teeth have a disease around the roots caused by a build up of plaque. Moral of the story? Trust your dentist. Meanwhile, the dog (especially the bone-crushers and the largest dog to ever walk the earth, Epicyon, meaning "top dog!") and enteledont teeth that I saw were just really worn down because they were basically making a habit of eating bone. Not a good habit to have.

Now, I have to say one thing that I really like about Nebraska: they are the only state to have a highway paleontology program. If you go to build a road and find something, someone actually cares enough to stop construction and find out what it is. Between this and paleontologists involving anyone who finds a fossil worth collecting in the actual collection, I've noticed that there are a lot fewer folks in it for the money and a lot more into paleontology just because its a really cool science, and they aren't afraid to bring things in. Nebraska has its priorities strait; education is up there at the top. They have a lot of fossils and don't need every single mammoth tooth, but when they do request that one be donated, well, people tend to oblige. And if folks come from miles just to watch an excavation from the opposite hill? Even better. A small child finds a bone? Well, he gets to help take it out of the ground. And yet the scientists still get their work done, still get bones back to the museum intact with no more damage than if they'd done it themselves (because if you teach people how to treat fossils, they remember and use it), still do research so that they have new things to teach about.

That's the kind of scientist I want to be. That's how science should be.