We had a scheduled singing lesson for Grace today at midday, so we split a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in two around the lesson.
You might recognise this as the one (or parts thereof) used in the movies Night At The Museum. It kinda looks similar, but given the damage in the movie, it was either CGI or just a set at another location.
This is largely a great big set of dioramas, each laid out as a representative scene of whatever was displayed. It ranged from insects to small rodents to horses to elephants to a blue whale. The collection started back in 1869 (different location) and has been updated continually ever since. In 1999 a planetarium was added. It was really quite well done.
The main entrance, complete with the dinosaurs:
Easter Island Head (who called Ben Stiller’s character “Dum Dum”):
No Capuchian (hahaha – “Kampuchean” is wrong Mr. auto-correct!) monkeys, but plenty of others:
Look! a flying shark!
In the Planetarium we watched the same movie (30mins) that we missed in San Francisco – lucky) about Dark Matter. I tried to have a science lesson with Ellie & Grace but they rolled their eyes pretty quickly.
We sensed Grace’s boredom (after all it was a holiday, so why was she in a museum?) so we didn’t cover it all. Added to out “next time” list.