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Mainly, this is gonna just be a picture gallery of various exhibits, with more to be added later once I develop some l33t p#0tOsHoP skills. Or something.

Overall, the AMNH is very enjoyable, but I think to truly savour the experience, one needs a couple of days to fully explore and appreciate the myriad exhibits here. Sadly, some of the exhibitions were closed, or under renovations at the time we attended. Oh well. Just more reason to visit again, no?

Their Discovery Centre was quite different to ours in several ways, the first being the number of people. I found ours to be more densely packed, even though our attendance is much lower than that of the AMNH. Also, they had far better equipment, such as microscopes, but I wonder to what extent it is used on a daily level. Plus, no live animals. :/ I find that simply having live animals, and being involved in the care and maintenance of them and their enclosures leads to ample opportunities to educate and communicate with the public. Also, our Centre is not specifically geared to a certain age group, trying to cater to a wide range of social groups - not so in the AMNH, where there was a distinct primary-school age feel. Much credit is due to their setup and displays, which were impeccably displayed. I'd be curious as to what the comparative budgets are like. We don't quite get the same figures, I'd warrant. We get about $2500US a year now to run an entire wing. Sure, that works if you're static, and under little pressure to change. Not so us. But I digress.

 I won't bore you with my rhapsodies and fawning over seeing many of the most famous dinosaur specimens in the world in person. Fin looks up to the posters around his room, many of the skeletons in them being the same as contained below. Needless to say, I had a wonderful time in the AMNH, and wonderful company too.

	This is a lovely way to introduce people to cladistics, doubly so since they can see how different families of dinosaurs are linked together. Shame some of the models are rather... retro.
Ah, Stegosaurus. A lovely specimen, complete with juvenile in tow, and a life restoration. I found the ground-sweeping tail something of a letdown, as I feel many of the modern restorations with the tail held almost horizontally behind are more accurate. In my eyes, anyway.
	This is a mummified hadrosaur (duckbill). From this, we've been able to learn about the skin of dinosaurs, and how they were scaled. Interestingly, a paper has been published on bristle-like integuement on the tails of small marginocephalians. Nothing in palaeo stays forever, it seems.
Protoceratops andrewsi and a clutch of eggs. Recent studies of the eggs in nests such as this have shown that the parents of the eggs were actually small theropods, such as Oviraptor, formerly thought to have been raiding the nests for food..
	Mmmmmm, sexy. Triceratops (not sure which species, since there's around fifteen, or five, depending on your point of view). Several tonnes of power, with the motto of "An aggressive offense is a good defense."
In the rear, we can see an original way to display a very large specimen without losing space. A wireframe outline of the body of Indricotherium, the largest known land mammal ever, has been erected, with the skull included to give you some sense of the size of the living beast.
	Xiphactinus, a late Cretaceous bony fish, and myself to scale. I'll never put on a lifejacket again.
SwiftEagle plays with the jigsaw-like skeleton on display in the Discovery Centre. This had magnets attached in such a way that the pieces could easily be removed and replaced. I think it might be a tad too complex for the under-teens, though. Most wouldn't have the understanding of anatomy necessary to figure out in what order all the vertebrae would go, let alone what some of the smaller bones would even be.
	Ah, the Barosaurus mount in the main entrance. Truly impressive. When you stop, and think about the lungs and ribs expanding, the heart pumping, the blood flowing through every vein, the *live* animal.. it blows your mind.
Another view of the Barosaurus mount. Notice the Allosaurus at her feet? It's after the juvenile behind her.
	Yeah, the colours are all screwy. This mount is so damn big, I had to take the photo in two halves, and graft them together.
This is the Hall of Biodiversity. I love that at least one sample from almost every order of animal life is included. You could spend an entire day just going from one to the next. Insects themselves could take you an hour. Plus, they're not just simply in neat lines. A flock of butterflies wings its way upwards, while a giant squid model hangs above you, tentacles adrift in the air..
	This is the Canadian Navy on training drills. (Hi, Wang!)

Museum-going #wiigii! members SwiftEagle, Quezovercoatl, Finback, Tonyfitz and Monocle.

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Have I made any mistakes? Images not working? Email me at finback@animail.net.