Hey hey!

I'm back from Kansas! (Did I even mention I was going there?)

Anyway. The reason: To meet up with my DA pal, (aka Sarah), who studies fossil fish at KU. I went with my S.O., Mitch, and we got a very cool tour of the natural history museum there, thanks to her!

The museum itself was neat, but behind the scenes was truly amazing. I got to see stuff I'd only previously seen on The Discovery Channel and PBS...there was a whole collection of fossils catalogued in a big room down in the basement (kind of looked like a giant library card catalog), and that was pretty cool. I got to see a big spinal column of a Camarasaurus, a partial skull of a Pentaceratops (I got to hold one of the horns from its face in my hands--never done that before!--that was wild).

I got to see the lab where they chipped away at fossils too. Sarah's specialy is fish, so she showed me some of the ones she was working on.

Then there were the collections of preserved specimens--rooms and rooms full. Of course the herpetology room was my favorite. I saw snakes, lizards, and other animals I never thought I'd see. They have quite a collection.

One thing they had in the fish room that blew Mitch and I away was a preserved coelocanth. I had never actually seen one before, so it was really awesome. For those who don't know, coelocanths are a cretaceous lobe-finned fish thought to be extinct until the 1930s when a fisherman caught one off the coast of Africa.

At the end of our visit, Sarah gave me the original of this:

Which I shall get into a frame asap!

All in all, great weekend. It was really neat to see the labs where people worked on fossils and actually get up close and see all that stuff for real. Too cool.

Once again, big thanks to Sarah for a great tour!