Yesterday, hubby and I headed to Pittsburgh to visit a few of the museums in downtown Pittsburgh, specifically the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the Phipps Conservatory. (Okay, technically, the Phipps isn’t a museum, but it’s in the neighborhood, and it serves much the same purpose for people wanting to look at living plants.) This is principally a photo diary: come below the fold for more.
But first, here’s a message from our ever-popular sponsor:
Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
Hubby had a desire to see the dinosaurs when we got to the Carnegie Museum, so we embarked in that direction. (We got slightly confused because entry to the Carnegie is through the gift shop.) We did spend some time looking at the minerals before heading to the dinosaurs, but I didn’t take any photos of the minerals. The principal display hall is this one:
The diplodocus fossil in the front is the species named for Andrew Carnegie himself (diplodocus carnegiei) as he funded dinosaur-digging expeditions in the western US where fossils were plentiful. The specimen behind is an apatosaurus (which used to be called brontosaurus until somebody figured out the two previously separately designated species were the same, and apatosaurus was named first, so that name stuck). Both of these species had extremely long tails, a feature that is impossible to see in this photo, unfortunately. The tails of both specimens stretch out and nearly touch above the path behind. Displays speculated that the creatures might have used these tails as whips, as a protection against predators, and that when deployed as such, the whip motion could have approached the speed of sound, resulting the “crack” we associate with whips. Below the front-end of the apatosaurus was a rare juvenile apatosaurus:
This specimen was just about 2 feet high and maybe 6 feet long, minuscule compared to the adult. It is estimated that this creature was just 1 year old when it died.
There was another specimen of a juvenile dinosaur, again, of a large sauropod, still in the posture in which it was found:
As far as I could tell, the main difference between the camarasaurus and the other two sauropods was that it’s head was more blocky and box-like. The block in which this specimen is preserved is about 7 feet square, but adult camarasauruses were just as big as apatosaurus and diplodocus.
All of these fossils come from the Jurassic period, the middle section of what’s called the Mesozoic era. The principal predator of this period was the allosaurus, a fossil of which was shown right next to the apatosaurus:
Given the size differential, it’s not likely that allosaurus would have attempted to hunt any of the large sauropods—for the same reason that predators leave elephants alone, by and large. They could end your attack just by stepping on you. The juveniles, on the other hand, would have been vulnerable.
You might be wondering where the tyrannosaurus rex is in this display. That species evolved tens of millions of years later to terrorize the period following the Jurassic, which is called the Cretaceous period. T. rex is believed to have evolved from allosaurus. Of course, I put his/her photo at the top of the diary.
Here re a few other photos:
And to end the parade of dinosaurs, we have a sea-going reptile of the era, a mosasaur:
The mosasaur was described as the most fearsome sea creature that has ever swam in the oceans of Earth.
Moving to the Phipps Conservatory, we visited just at the end of it’s orchid show as part of its winter display, which was about to be displaced by the spring show. I have only a few photos of the orchids:
We got a behind-the-scenes tour from a friend who works there, but I didn’t take any photos there.
Separating the Pittsburgh museum complex and the Phipps Conservatory is the Schenley Bridge. This appears to be the place where lovers place their locks as a token of their love. We hadn’t seen this sort of practice before, or perhaps we just hadn’t noticed it before (we don’t get out much).
So that was our trip to Pittsburgh. Now to the comments!
Top Comments (March 9, 2019):
No nominations submitted tonight.
Highlighted by Tool:
This comment by SteveG177 from Hunter’s front page post on Joe Biden not being the best potential candidate for the presidency.
Top Mojo (March 8, 2019):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Top Photos (March 8, 2019):
Tonight’s picture quilt is courtesy of jotter!