A Natuarl History of Arizona

Back on 23 October we went over to Mesa to the Arizona Museum of Natural History. This museum has the largest collection of fossils in the state. At least, that’s what they claim. They do have other stuff in their collection related to Arizona’s human history, but their impressive collection of fossils is clearly the focus. That section of the museum is three stories tall and the rest is only one.

The right off the lobby a “time tunnel” leads you back to the formation of the universe. There are several meteorites on display, most estimated to be older than our planet. Among these is a fragment from the Canyon Diablo Meteorite which created the famous Barringer Crater in north-central Arizona. The crater is most well-known as simply Meteor Crater. We hope to get up there to see it while we still live in the area. These meteorites lead into a gallery on earth rocks and the mineral wealth of Arizona, but we didn’t learn anything new about minerals we hadn’t learned recently.

At the bottom level the fossil exhibits started. The displays spiraled up from the basement floor around a large central display called Dinosaur Mountain. Each higher level of the mountain is covered by animatronic reconstructions of younger and younger animals. Down at the bottom is Triassic-aged Tanystropheus, above that is Stegosaurus, then on the Cretaceous level is Pentaceratops and at the top is Glyptotherium. The Mountain is supposed to represent how the Grand Canyon has carved its way “back in time” by eroding deeper and deeper into the earth. To illustrate this, there is a stream cascading down the mountainside all the time. For dramatic effect, about every twenty minutes a “flash flood” dumps a lot of extra down the cliff face. There flash floods are about the only good thing about Dinosaur Mountain. The animatronics are fairly bad. Most of the dinos don’t even move any more and the ones that do are jerky and out of synch. Their noises are mostly just annoying. For example, the T. rex roar and be heard all through the museum!

The displays along this long, spiral path through time are a lot better. All the specimens come from Arizona and they each have information about the dig-sites they were recovered from. These sites are all explained and their significance to paleontology as a whole is noted. The signage did a good job of not only explaining what is known about past geologic ages, but also why that has been determined. We saw trilobites, aetosaurs, a Dilophosaurus reconstruction, a mosasaur skull, pterosaur wings, a Tyrannosaurus rex skull and full skeletons of Apatosaurus, Protoceratops and Triceratops. Out of all of that, perhaps the most shocking thing was seeing just how much “artistic license” Crichton and Spielberg took with Dilophosaurus. There is, of course, no frill and no evidence for poison-spitting. Not only that, but Dilophosaurus is rather larger than in the famous film. Seen full size and without the frill, Dilophosaurus looks about like a Velociraptor, which could also be part of the reason they were re-imagined for the film.
Moving on to the human history section of the museum we went into several reconstructions. There was a paleoindian cave, a Hohokam village, a Spanish mission, and a gold mine. These were all fairly interesting, but were fairly straightforward portrayals. The neatest part of the human history side was the History Courtyard where we got to pan for “gold.” There is a large fountain in the middle that looks something like a mountain stream. The water flowed through several sand-filled pools. Mixed into the sand was pyrite, fool’s gold. You scooped up the sand in a pan and swished the water around, letting it take the lighter sand away with it and leaving the heavier gold. This is the way it’s supposed to work anyway. Pyrite is not as heavy as gold though so it was actually really hard to get the sand and the “gold” to separate. We did out best and each came away with a little bag of the shiny stuff.

We parked in a spot that was limited to three hours. We thought this would be plenty of time, but as it turned out we had to hurry through the last little bit of the museum to get back to the car in time. It was a nice afternoon.