natural history gallery (melbourne museum part 2)

i was so far very impressed with the melbourne museum, and i'd only seen the lobby!

as ms. rhonwyn had told me to enjoy the rest of the museum while she set up a surprise for me... i have no idea what it is. i can't wait (well okay i CAN wait, but i don't want to!)... i was going to do just that, and check out the rest of the museum.

now as i was no longer carrying any magic artifacts (like on my just finished museum quest) i could just wander around and enjoy the place.

after all i do really enjoy museums. as funny as it may sound they have a very homely feeling to me, and i feel very comfortable in them... it isn't funny though really. if you were laughing stop. you're being more silly than me right now! i grew up in a museum after all...


the melbourne museum just kept delivering after that amazing lobby... first thing you hit after the admission desk was a full mounted "pygmy" blue whale skeleton. it was just like the one at te papa only it was mounted at guest level rather than hanging from the ceiling.


these cool fish... uh thingies... decorated the windows of the museum further away from the lobby.

than came a preview display for the dinosaur hall. which got me both excited to see it, and also reminded me of ms. rhonwyn's surprise which she was giving me in the dinosaur hall...


rather than dwell on what ms. rhonwyn was mustering up for me i kept up checking out the museum. which was pretty big, and was thus going to take me a while.

outside the human related galleries was this nifty mini fort building effort. though i have to say the mini people were not being very industrious. ants make up for their small size by colossal effort. these mini people seemed to be letting their low lot in life depress them into inaction...

sadly no photos were allowed in the human galleries of the museum so this is the only one i can show you.

which is okay because my favourite parts of museums tend to be the natural history galleries!


the display outside these halls had me panic for a second.


there were some baby triceratops. awwww oh so cute... baby steaks... mmmmm steak... what people of the innerweb? i can't think my future dinner is cute?!?!?


anyways i panicked as for a moment i worried that i'd accidentally stumbled into the dinosaur hall.


it just turned out to be another preview and also a kid museum attraction. with a few warm up, but small dinosaur display items kids tend to get really psyched by the rest of the museum. this velociraptor skull being a perfect item for the task...


it also turned out to be the museum's dinosaur nursery. the melbourne museum was only now just building up a internal supply of living dinosaurs now to entertain guests in addition to their fossil displays. the nursery was now being used on the just recently acquired triceratops eggs, but had first been used on this locally found minmi when she first hatched a couple years ago.

i guess you could say she was cute people of the web wide world, but i say ankylosaurs are only good for trouble!... nothing ever came from an ankylosaurs other than lost teeth and jaw pain!!!


admittedly i spent a bit of time checking out these little guys. they were the first flesh and blood dinosaur i'd been in any sort of contact with since my cousin larry's visit. as they were only babies they were both agreeable, and more cute than my cousin.
_
in the main natural history corridor was a very weird half to something i'd already seen at te papa. the race horse phar lap. here in the case before me was the skin/hide of this famous horse. te papa has his bones (i didn't post my picture of them, but i will at some point). kinda creepy that they'd split him up like that if you ask me...


than came the australia animals display. as you probably know people of the web wide world australia has a lot of unique and special animals "trapped" on its shores. well this was a great display to get to know a lot of them.


there was of course a whole variety of the ever famous aussie marsupial kangaroo. like this GIANT red kangaroo.


reminding us that australia (like new zealand) has suffered biologically due to human actions was a stuffed now extinct tasmanian tiger or thylacine.


an aussie ratite the emu.


my fav was the giant saltwater crocodile.


the dome crested cassowary is also sure to please.


they seem to have gotten one of their labels on the sign wrong. they said this thing was a tasmanian devil, but yet it didn't spin or stand on two legs.


the frilled lizard that inspired the terrible dilophosaur (but frilled lizards aren't terrible mind you) was from here too.


the cold blooded cases were neato too. australia has tons and tons of reptiles for example (unlike new zealand).


things like monitor lizards, or as they call them here goanna lizards. i'll have to post on these mosasaur relatives later.


speaking of mosasaur relatives, australia is the world's capital for poisonous snakes. check all of them out.


they also have a lot of big cool squids as you can see.


a king crab rules over the ocean cabinet.


the jumbo gar in the middle of the ocean case was a slight reminder of home (as in the tyrrell). though our gars at the tyrrell were like 1/5 the size.

next was the earth science section. there was a giant geode... though not as massive as the geode from the movie the core, but than again i don't think you'd get one 100's of kms long and in the molten centre of the earth!

i really liked their black light rock identifier room.


in their insect hall i came face to face with, and than promptly retreated from a GIANT bug... someone has to stop my old boss at the vancouver eco-centre from spreading his monstrously large bugs around the world... i wonder if i was working for a real super villain back than, and saw the beginnings of his bid for world domination?


seriously this isn't the first time i've run into them since i'd left canada. there were also some in new zealand!

i hid behind this case, and for a long time i thought there was nothing in it but some plants. that is till i realized that some of the twigs were moving... they were walking sticks. no people of the innerweb, not actual sticks that walked. insects that use camouflage to look like their sticks!

marking the beginning of the marine gallery was a wall of crabs.

inside a sampling of various australian marine predators. the one that caught my eye for the photo was that of the skull of an orca or killer whale.

next i ran into something that just made me laugh. a great white shark, but sadly not anywhere near as awesome as the front lobby one. no this one was neither properly shaped (not that it was terribly shaped) nor life size (unlike the amazing lobby one).

it was the exact same model i'd been seeing pop up everywhere since wellington. one here, another here, and the last one here (oh and NOW here ;p ). i totally had to get in on making great whites cause there was definitely a market for them here down under!

the shark jaw display was outstanding though. can you believe this is just a SAMPLING of australia's sharks. there's several key species missing from this wall!?!?!

in the last room you walk into the middle of one of nature's most epic battles... well okay at least a recreation through artifacts of said battle.

on one side was the skull of the sperm whale... which had i not already seen the real living animal or the full skeleton at te papa would have been way cool. now it was just cool... and on the other side (making up for the lack of gusto i had for a mere skull of sperm whale... and don't get me wrong i LOVE sperm whales!)

a preserved giant squid!!!

in the middle of the whole museum complex was an indoor forest, that put the cretaceous garden at the tyrrell to shame. one i had the feeling i was going to see a lot more of soon...

underneath the main corridors monitor lizard statue fun stuff was materializing...

ms. rhonwyn had prepared her surprise for me, and was waiting for me to arrive.

man oh man i had no idea what i was walking into...

next the surprise...

museum of caves (museum quest part 22)

Location: Waitomo

Baskets Left: 1
_

alright people of the innerweb... having just one of the flax baskets left i was in serious shape to finish off this museum quest for ms. rhonwyn.

not that trouble wasn't now, again, lurking potentially everywhere... whiro, maori god of darkness and suffering, had managed to catch up with me on the north island in the form of his insect minions. though i'd managed to deal with the lot of mosquitoes and sand flies he'd sent at me (though i STILL itch everywhere!!!), what are the odds i killed every mozzie and sandfly in new zealand?

so i pushed on. i was running out of stops on the list ms. rhonwyn had given me. i had a plan to make myself harder to follow. i only had one more stop before my trail went erratic again...
_

that stop was here in waitomo. famous for its glow worm cave, but to be honest its just the north island's version of the te anau cave. as i wasn't allowed take pictures in the cave, but if you check out my post from earlier in the quest about the south island cave their pretty much the same thing. the waitomo caves a little bit bigger, but the te anau ones are more hardcore and movie seeming!

sadly the last basket didn't fancy the cave, and so nothing happened. frankly i'm not surprised. i just had my hopes up. the way the other two ketes vanished so quickly had me hoping maybe it was a trend...
_
my second stop in waitomo was the museum of caves. it was the second museum in new zealand i'd encountered with an admission, again a surprise, but something i'm just fine paying (and frankly musuem's can use the money!). just if you pop in you'll need $5. which if you ask me is a bargain.


outside there was plenty of neat stuff. a small miniature waka (maori war canoe).

some of the funky limestone from which water erosion carves out the caves this area is famous for.


inside guests are greeted by a GIANT weta replica. i haven't really seen any wetas in new zealand yet. which has me sad. their apparently really common. even cooler they hail from before my time in the cretaceous... at some point i'm planning on doing a Palaeo FACT! about them, but not at moment.

right away you'll forget the price of admission, or at worst realize it was very worthwhile. about 5 steps past the front desk is (i think the real specimen, but it could be a cast of) new zealand's largest ammonite!

its a beauty! definitely worth checking out.

you're than shown a "road" map of some of the major cave systems of the area.

this display also did an excellent job explaining how water slowly seeping through the 30 million year old limestone slowly eroded out the tunnel system.

in addition to the mini cave recreation the next display was a real life restoration. granted it was only a small patch of wall. the real caves go on FOREVER, this one is honestly a let down at only 2 metres long...

than a large number of the exhibits were on my favourite thing ever... fossils!

this particular display case was a little varied having both fossil ferns and the "pens" of squid like belemnites (though i didn't know squid could write!).

there were some more (smaller) ammonites beside the belemnites.

most of the fossil remains were much more recent that the mesozoic. including this primitive ratite... or for you less sciency people out there flightless bird, related to new zealand's better known kiwi and moa.

there's also a sweet tuatara skeleton!

some prehistoric kiwi skulls. these are the first fossil kiwis i'd seen in new zealand. turns out the kiwi is a REALLY old part of new zealand...

a fossil pukeko (which i'll post my pictures of the living bird soon... forgot to throw up the ones i took in rotorua!).

with of course the big finale of the moas that are often found in the caves... caves a routinely a great place to find more geologically recent fossils. this is because they are cut off from a lot of the key decomposing elements of the surface (contrary to popular images almost all big caves are underground and not at surface level). meaning that if any animals are unfortunate enough to fall into a cave their bones after survive (to an extent anyway). the water that runs throughout the waitomo region might also help permineralize the bones (i'm not sure as there was no sign).

though for the small size of this museum there were TONS of moas, it still didn't quite match our crazy giant moa gallery at the otago museum. they did have a really nice mount compared to ours.

the last major exhibit content was on modern life of the caves. including a tank full of eels. these guys apparent love it down there, as normally their nocturnal on the surface. in the permanent darkness of the caves they can be active and eat all the time!

of course this museum wouldn't be complete without a major display on glowworms. i've already covered them in te anau, but if you hit waitomo first on your trip to new zealand this will get you up to speed just as well.

next the most beautiful detour ever...