Food, Dinosaurs and Distant Worlds

Jennifer took a few days off this week to spend with Maura and me. We had planned to go camping but had put off making site reservations and in the end we decided not to go. Money is tight and we have extra expenses coming up. We didn’t want to spend all our time sitting at home though. On Monday we took advantage of our Museum of Science membership and spent the afternoon there. We took in the current temporary exhibitions and saw a show at the recently renovated Hayden Planetarium.

Our first stop once we’d arrived at the museum and picked up tickets for the planetarium show was to “What I Eat: Around the World in 25 Diets”, a temporary exhibit exploring dietary habits of people around the world through photographs showing what individuals from around the world ate on one day. The exhibit was not hands on but it was fascinating for all of us. We spent quite a while reading all the captions. Maura couldn’t miss any. She wanted her mother to read them to her but after the first dozen or so we made them read them herself. The diets of the people around the world made me think about the similarities and differences in what people eat in different places and the factors that affect the quantity and quality of the food.

Our next stop was “Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries”, another temporary exhibit which will only be at the museum through August 21^st. It explores some of the new discoveries and ideas that have been made about dinosaurs in the last few years. New finds from China allow for the reconstruction of an entire Cretaceous landscape and new studies of the biomechanics of dinosaur skeletons tell us about how they walked and ate and how they might have found their mates. Some of the exhibits were hands on and others had beautiful audiovisual components.

We finished our trip to the museum by taking in a planetarium show. We had two free passes from our membership at the museum that we wanted to use before they expired so we only had to pay for Maura. The Hayden Planetarium has recently been upgraded so it can now show more than how the stars look from the surface of the Earth (though it can still do that). We saw “Undiscovered Worlds” about the discovery of planets around stars other than the sun. The program explained how the planets can be detected and what we can learn about them and discussed some of the discoveries that have been made so far. The imaginative representations of some of the worlds that have been detected based about what we know about their composition and surface temperature made for some impressive visuals. We all enjoyed the show which was both informative and visually stunning. It also had the extra advantage of letting us sit down for a while at the end of our day.