Dinosaur Tiime

Unless you're addicted to PBS documentaries, the name O.C. Marsh and Hiram Bingham probably won't mean much to you.  We 'did' another Yale Museum

yesterday - The Peabody.  This is their museum of natural history and it's sort of a miniature of the New York City Natural History Museum.  As I'm discovering, if they are willing to put in on display in Bulldog Land, then it's of the first order.  My favorite portion of the museum was the Connecticut Bird exhibition.  That said, I will be SO glad when someone figures out it's just a little creepy to show dead stuffed birds.  They remind me of 'hair art'.  This was a Victorian invention.  Pictures, or even worse, jewelry was made out of the hair of a dead loved one to commemorate the loss.  Morbid, morbid, morbid.  Hundreds of perched, pecking, flying, preening stuffed birds evokes the same shudder.

I love birds, and I'm starting to be able to identify more and more of them when I see them.  Understand, I'm in first grade in the birder world, but I do get a thrill whenever I'm able to identify one. All of I'm saying is that I'd rather see a twenty second video of a live bird than a mounted, stuffed one.  They did have one bird you wouldn't be able to get a video of.  They had a dodo.  

Dodos have gotten the rap of being stupid, and their name has come to mean a stupid person.  Actually, they evolved on Mauritius Island where they didn't have any natural predators and had access to an unlimited food supply.  The result was the more ground plants and seeds they ate, the less they used their wings which began to atrophy and become out of proportion to the size of their ever increasing bodies until they could neither fly nor could they run fast. Along come humans, and nicely fill the niche of 'predator'.  The dodo is the first recorded species whose extinction was a direct result of human beings.  The passenger pigeon also comes to mind as one of these early casualties.

The showy part of the natural history collection are their dinosaurs.  O. C. Marsh, a Yale professor, was one of the first successful dinosaur bone hunters.  He has a bit of a tragic finale, but you can look him up.  In his heyday, he brought back to New Haven thousands of pounds of bones.  Many have been assembled into skeletons resulting in this hall.  This is one of those big plant eaters.

The museum was more interesting than I anticipated.  There is a wonderful section of dioramas showing natural habitats of various climates in the United States.  The 'desert' section looked real familiar.  There was also a very interesting history of hominids (that's us) with bronze casts of skulls of our 'cousins' mounted next to bronze casts of a skull of a homo sapien.  It was a great visual of what is usually presented 2D.  

Finally, who was Hiram Bingham III?  He was a Yale professor who went looking in Peru for the lost city of the Incas, and he found it:  Macchu Pichu. He single handedly invented Incan archaeology  and as a result brought home thousands of artifacts from the sites he excavated.  In 2011, Yale returned all those artifacts to the grateful government of Peru.  That action impressed me more than all the collections put together.     

As always, if you want to look at the rest of the pix - here they are:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/115478608971584948192/albums/5902488629502656801?authkey=CMje75uJ797Q1QE