On Thursday night we had the members’ opening for VMNH’s new exhibit, “Dinosaurs”. We borrowed cast skeletons from several museums for the exhibit, including the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences excellent Acrocanthosaurus mount (above).
From the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, we have a beautiful cast skull of Diabloceratops:
In addition to numerous other casts, we have a maze, “Dinosaur Discovery”, in which children can spend time learning about dinosaurs. We’ve also brought out lots of bones from our excavations on BLM land near Shell, Wyoming:
Among the Wyoming specimens on display are a Diplodocus scapulocoracoid that we started preparing at our Dino Day festival in 2008, and a diplodocid femur that we opened on Dino Day in 2010:
We also brought out some of our Stegosaurus material:
For the opening reception on Thursday we were joined by Geb Bennett of the Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum and Dr. John Happ, formerly of Shenandoah University, to announce the transfer of the SVDM collection of BLM fossils to VMNH.
Our 2013 Dino Day festival is scheduled for tomorrow, January 12. In keeping with past Dino Days, we plan to open a new jacket, in this case the huge Triceratops skull from the SVDM collection. John Happ, who excavated the skull (below), is planning to join us tomorrow for the opening.
If you’re in the Martinsville area please join us tomorrow for what promises to be an exciting day of paleontology.
