fajrdrako | Classic winter's day... (Reply)

I slept late this morning: something I don't normally do, but obviously this month all my normal patterns are out the window. Had a delicious breakfast of pancakes with fruit, and played around on IMVU with

maaboroshi and

maaseru, which was fun, though I find avatars and physical environments get in the way of conversation rather than enhancing it - particularly since all my typos are visible to my companions. Ouch! I type very fast and very inaccurately, fixing as I go. Doesn't work well in real time.

I walked to the Museum of Nature, met up with the OSFS crowd, and explored the dinosaurs. We knew the museum was under reonvations; didn't know that 2/3 of it is under wraps and inaccessible. Started out with a film on squids and their brains. I happen to heartily dislike all films about underwater creatures, especially fish; but the squid was kind of interesting. They were doing squid intelligence tests, trying to figure out how much of its behaviour is due to instinct and how much is intelligence and reasoning power. Suprisingly interesting.

For the rest, well, what the Ottawa Museum of Nature does well is dinosaurs. These may have interested me when I was four years old, I'm not sure, but ever since then I've found dinosaurs a total bore. This includes their dessicated skeletal remains, their painted plaster simulacra, and drawings or charts thereof. I did work up a little interest over a proto-feline creature whose name I have already forgotten, a skeleton of an aquatic dinosaur with the longest neck I have ever seen, and a thing like a turtle with spiky plates, about twenty feet long, that Lyn dubbed 'Leo' after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

I was intrigued by a map of North America in the Late Cretaceous Age, and miffed that the write-up didn't tell us when that was in terms of years and dates. (I do so prefer historical time to geological time! You know where you are with dates.) At that time, what is now North America was bisected by a large channel, making two distinct continents roughly divided by the prairies and the U.S. midwest, which were under water.

If I understand Wikipedia on the matter, this was about 70 to 80 million years ago. But I wonder why the Wikipedia map implies that only the U.S.A. existed at that time?

And why do I find ancient geography and long-vanished seas fascinating, but dinosaurs not worth a second glance?

I walked to the museum from my place - it takes about 15 minutes - and then home again. I've walked so little all month, it was a pleasure: a sunny cold day, but not bitterly cold. I walked home by way of the Rideau Canal and enjoyed seeing hundreds of people skating for the first time this year. I wished I'd taken my camera, with the sunlight amber through the trees, and all the colourful skaters.