Natural History Museum

Yesterday I spent four hours at the Museum of Natural History just west of Central Park.  It's a vast place; one of the specialties are exquisite dioramas, many close to a century old, depicting all sorts of critters in their natural habitat.  Here's a jaguar prowling about.  The dioramas are set in actual places...this is in NW Mexico, I believe.  

Some big ol' elk.

Here a couple bloke moose are battling over a sheila, who is watching on the left.  

There is an entire hall devoted to Northwest Indian tribes, just like at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria.  There is a collection of Haida masks here too.

The Tlingit were warriors, and devised suits of armor.  The one on the right uses Chinese coins as a kind of chain mail.  Blow up the pic for more details.

Here's a Haida canoe.  A massive vessel!

Here a really big walrus presides over his diorama.

And some portly fur sloats!  The males weigh up to two tons...not quite as large as the elephant sloats but still massive.

A skeleton of an Irish elk.  This ice age mammal had the biggest rack of any animal its size...no larger than a modern elk.  It went extinct about 10 thousand years ago, probably due to a shortage of Guinness in those days.

Another cool Ice Age mammal was the glyptodont, basically an armadillo on steroids.  

And on to the stars of the show, the dinosaurs.  This is a styracosaurus, kind of a hi tech version of triceratops.  Blow up the pic to see the detail in its neck shield.

Here's old T-Rex, 50 feet of badass.  Don't kid him about his small arms...that really pisses him off.  And he does have sharp claws on his little hands.

This is apatosaurus, essentially the brontosaurus we grew up withAnd here's allosaurus, the ancestor of t-rex, dining on a tail of poor ol' apato.