The New Mexico Museum of Natural History was very new and up-to-date, and mercifully not very child infested. They had a big section on astronomy, which was flashy and high tech but not very clear or well laid out. Some of the displays were so dark you couldn’t really see them. The ancient life section was much better, although the arrangement was weird and I kept finding myself going backward in time. Beside some well-done displays of the apparently obligatory T. Rex skeleton....
...and dinosaur battle....
...they had a cool replica of a T. rex footprint – several feet across and with big scary claws...
...and a window into the fossil preparation lab, where you could see the stages of how fossil bones are laboriously cut out of the rock and pieced back together as they were in life millions of years ago.
One of the scariest displays was just a rock with the tracks of an ancient giant millipede, with a reconstruction of what that critter must have looked like. It was about 5 feet long! That is just too big for a bug.
The best part of the museum, as it is with most natural history museums, was the part concentrating on the periods best represented on the local fossil record. For New Mexico this is the period just after the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, when the southwest was much wetter with a greater variety of habitats. Even though the huge dinosaurs and giant bugs were gone, there were still some pretty weird creatures around as the mammals diversified. They showed this variety with a series of murals form various periods.
This one is from about 50 million years ago, with a lot of animals that are funny looking but are sort of similar to current species. There are ancestors of horses, camels, hippos and rhinos in the picture (these all lived for a long time in North America but disappeared 10,000 years ago), along with quite a few that have no surviving relatives. The big guy with the bumps on his head is a Uintathere, which has no surviving descendants. They also had some fossil skeletons of Ice Age animals like this saber tooth cat.
The other museum I visited was more unique, the Museum of Atomic History. It was a bit too full of stuff and jumbled, but they had some very interesting displays such as the amounts and types of radiation that exist all the time.
They also traced the story of the discovery of radioactivity, especially the work of Madame Curie in discovering radium.
There was a lot of material about the ways radioactive material was used in the early days, before anyone really understood its effects. This product, the Revigator, exposed water to radioactive radon gas. Then you were supposed to drink the water and the radioactivity was supposed to make you feel younger.
Pale faces were very fashionable then, so a little radiation poisoning probably made you popular. Fortunately, most of the other radioactivity based products of the early 1900’s were harmless bunk.
The museum really concentrated on the history of atomic weapons, and displayed a copy of the letter Albert Einstein wrote to Roosevelt which led to the Manhattan project and the atomic bomb.
Since most of the scientific work in developing the atomic bomb was done on nearby Los Alamos, they had a lot a memorabilia of life at that very secret installation and descriptions of the first atomic bomb test, also in New Mexico. From there they showed the development of atomic weapons, with reproductions of the plutonium based “Big Boy” bomb used on Hiroshima...
...and the uranium 235 based “Little Man” bomb used on Nagasaki.
To their credit, they did not avoid discussing the moral and military issued behind the decision to use these bombs or describing the devastation created by them. This is a picture of a tricycle a three year-old boy was riding in Hiroshima at the time of the blast. He died from severe burns a few hours later.
After the war ended the military seemed eager to find all kinds of ways to use atomic weapons. They not only developed big bombs to destroy cities and armies, but all kinds of smaller bombs to destroy dams, submarines, tanks and whatever.
Incredibly, they even built an A-bomb that was carried in a 60 pound backpack. Somewhere, it seems they crossed the line between military needs and the endless male quest to find cool new ways of blowing stuff up.
It was amazing to see how many bombs were built by various countries, and how many hundreds of bombs tests there were in the 50’s. The US Air Force almost accidentally blew up Spain in 1966, when a B-52 crashed and dropped 4 H-bombs around a small village on the coast of Spain. None exploded, but they spread a lot of radioactive plutonium around which required a huge cleanup. Needless to say, Spain was not too happy about the incident and now forbids nuclear weapons in its airspace. The museum had a display describing the incident in detail, along with the empty casings of two of the recovered bombs.
I had a fun day out enjoying a couple museums but it was time to go back and see what little emergencies my family had while I was gone!
Mike
10/25/07
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