Dinosaur Bones!

We finished up D is for Dinosaur last week and had planned on going to the museum on Friday, but we couldn’t pass up a free puppet show at the library.  So today we headed out to Mesa to the Arizona Museum of Natural History.  It was quite a drive (about an hour each way), but worth it.

 

“They look like elephants mommy.”

“That’s a funny big bone.”

“That’s a little scary.”

   

They had a three story dinosaur mountain.

Fishing and learning about magnets and metal in the exploration room.  They had several different stations set-up with educational activity suggestions.  It was a good spot for Myanna to stretch her legs for a bit.

Did you know that Arizona has a state fossil?  Yep, it’s petrified wood. 

Or could it have been a catastrophic world wide flood?  Hmmmmm…… The boys are panning for gold.  The museum had other displays about Arizona history: Native Americans, the Lost Dutchman, the 5 “C”s (Copper, Citrus, Cattle, Climate and I can’t remember the last one) and movies that were filmed here.  They even had part of the old Mesa jail which was creepy.  This wasn’t like one of those Western touristy stick your face behind bars things - it was metal bunks, sinks, toilets, prisoners actually were in there at one time, yuck. 

Throughout the museum they had big floor puzzles.  Most of them had a comfy chairs or couch for the parents.  Of course the one the boys decided to put together didn’t have one.

We had a really fun day.  I thought Johnny would burst with excitement when he saw the first dinosaur.  He told his daddy that he saw a real live dinosaur today.  I’m not sure where I was.  :)  I was concerned before going because we believe in Creation and that the Earth is only thousands of years old not millions, but at their age they just wanted to look at stuff.  I didn’t read a whole to them beyond the names of the dinosaurs.  As they get older we’ll be teaching them evolution theory and why it is false, but for now they just like to look at the “monsters”.