For President's Day yesterday we drove down to Thanksgiving Point in Lehi and went to the Museum of Ancient Life. This was an awesome museum full of dinosaurs! We got to travel back in time 65 million years and learn about what life was like for the dinosaurs that lived then.
While at the museum we got to see over 60 full dinosaur skeletons. These dinosaurs were huge!
As you can see we only come up to the knee or ankle of the Brontosaurus! The full body took up the entire room.
We were able to see a Brontosaurus, Supersaurus. Stegosaurus, Triceratops, T-Rex, and a lot more. All of the kids thought it was fascinating. I was also amazed at everything we saw, read about, and learned as we walked through the museum. We learned about all of the different geological time eras beginning with the Paleozoic Era. In this era we learned about the first fishes, crustaceans, trilobites, and other first living things. We learned how these small life forms evolved into bigger fish and then amphibians and other animals that started to walk on land.
From there we got into the Mesozoic era including the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. We spent most of our time in this era because this is where all of the dinosaurs were. We were able to see all sorts of dinosaurs and learn about how they lived and what they ate. There were also a ton of hands on learning things like an erosion pool the kids could play in and interactive games. There were many actual dinosaur fossils and bones but most of the large skeletons were replicas. The items under glass and away from touching hands were the actual fossils. The things people could touch were casts which make sense because real fossils would be pretty fragile. They casts were still awesome to see. In the Cretaceous period room we saw a giant sea turtle skeleton and a giant ancient fish skeleton. They were so cool!
From here we moved to the Cenozoic Era and the evolution of animals and the evolution of humans. We got to see a full skeleton of a wholly mammoth and a life size replica of a Megalodon Shark! Everything was so huge! I am glad we live now and not in the time of these larger than life animals.
In all this was a great time spent with the family. The kids loved seeing the dinosaurs and learning more about them. Brooklyn calls the dinosaurs monsters. Thanksgiving Point has a bunch of other museums on their property that we would like to go back and see especially the Butterfly Biosphere. I am thinking a membership to this place would be fun to have in the future.
On the way home, we stopped at Scheels to ride the Ferris Wheel but sadly it was not going when we got there. So instead of riding, we browsed the store and saw all of the taxidermied animals. We will have to go back another time for the Ferris Wheel.
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