We weren't up early enough to see any of the beavers but we could certainly see the signs that they'd been here.
Being that it was early morning, it was chilly, cloudy, and the sun wasn't peaking through at all. This made Sparkie really sad as she knew this was the grasshopper trail. She kept looking all over the place for them but they were nowhere to be found. Mike kept trying to explain to her that they were all tucked away since it was still cold - but she didn't understand. Poor Sparkie.
Wazzu was much more interested in the chickens that we saw in the section where the trail goes behind some houses. The yards were nice and large yet these poor eight chickens were cram packed into this tiny little cage.
The walk was only an hour and forty minutes (all on leash) so the dogs weren't tired but at least they had a little bit of exercise so they could be relatively calm while Mike went on his outing.
I'm not sure what this was all about as Wazzu rarely wants to be near anyone let alone touch them. But Wazzu got up on the couch and laid down next to Slugger and they both went sound asleep. (Slugger was in heaven as he loves nothing more than to be touched - especially by one of the other dogs.)
After entertaining everyone this morning, I (Mike) visited the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, between Provo and Salt Lake City. It was a nice little museum, with good, up-to-date displays on the history of life on Earth. Unlike many natural history museums it was pretty thorough for all periods and did not skip over the hundreds of millions of years of little squirmy critters between the Cambrian and the dinosaurs. Here is a good display of an underwater life scene from about the Silurian Period, about 420 million years ago.
I managed to get almost to the end of the Permian before the place started filling up with screaming little kids. But I was good and didn't send any of them to sleep with the trilobites. (A paleontology/Godfather movie pun? Sorry.)
Utah is in the middle of the first and most famous dinosaur hunting areas in the world, and they had quite of bit of interesting information about the history of bone hunting in the area. One of the ways modern paleontologists find new fossils is to look through the records of the bone hunters of the 1800’s, relocate their dig sites and use modern methods to find even more fossils.
They had a lot of information about a couple of dinosaurs that were found originally in Utah – an extra large type of brontosaurus called Supersaurus (the tail which you can't see is as long as the neck),
and a predator called Ceratosaurus.
Other displays were a Pterodactyl:
And a Tyrannosaurus:
Before the yelling and running of the kids got too bad I made it to the end of their display that had some relatively recent animals I had never seen before, a really big scary looking bird...
A super sized great white shark....
And a cute little type of elephant about the size of a miniature horse.
They also had a theater showing 3-D movies about dinosaurs, but I skipped that once I saw the line of little kids. Overall, a pretty worthwhile visit.
Debbie & Mike
9/28/07
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