A Journey to the Past

I took my inner child to the Canadian Museum of Nature today. It's located in an old stone castle type building built by Scottish masons in 1905 (the Victoria Memorial Museum Building) at the end of Metcalfe street. I had last been there on a school trip sometime in the 1970s when it was also the Museum of civilization. The Museum is undergoing extensive reconstruction both externally and internally and I have to admit it was much more of an impressive experience then walking the main hall to see a West coast totem pole reaching four stories high.Today I walked past construction barriers under scaffolding into an unfinished and gutted interior. I'm not complaining. I'm glad that there is funding being invested in the museum. It was just a big disappointment to my inner child in that regard.

To get to the exhibit I walked up the four flights of stairs to get to the first floor where the dinosaur and prehistoric mammal fossils are on display. The first exhibit was of three ancestors of the modern whale (Archaeocetes). The first was a dog like thing with a very long snout. The second was a similar skeleton but larger and with limbs that worked as paddles. You could see the hind legs had shrunk. The third was an even larger skeleton and this on had even more fin like forearms and the hind legs where wee little things that would be useless on shore. Very impressive. They also had a complete and enormous elasmosaurus skeleton as well as a giant ancient sea turtle. He or she lived 70 million years ago and swam the Western Interior Seaway that ran form where the Gulf of Mexico is to the Arctic through what are now the great plains of North America. Yes that thrilled my inner child.There was even a dinosaur bone that was on display for you to touch. Now that was exciting.

Afterword I was hoping to get some postcards but alas the museum book store didn't have anything local. Just generic Canadian souvenir postcards. Maybe that will change once they have the museum up to speed. All in all it will be fun to go back this summer with my nephews.

(their Website fails the friendly navigation test by the way)