Paleontologist Heaven and Paleopalooza: Wordless/Wordful Wednesday

I still don’t have updates on the renovation project, things have stalled a tad bit with Mother Nature throwing us winter weather that tends to crimp our style.  We did, however have a great day on Sunday at the Philadelphia Museum for Paleopalooza – Princess Nagger was in seventh heaven.

For her birthday back in November we spent the day at the Dinosaur Museum (of course) and she got to actually meet one of the famous Paleontologists that she has seen on many of her favorite dinosaur shows on National Geographic, Dr. Philip Manning:

After his informative presentation, he was very generous about letting the kids come up on stage to ask dinosaur questions.  Princess Nagger was thrilled to have a chance to ask him her dinosaur question (notice she’s wearing her Velociraptor shoes just for the occasion):

When we were there, we were told about the big event happening in February – Paleopalooza.  Of course we marked our calendars and made plans to go.  That’s what we did this past Sunday – it was a madhouse.  There were so many people there, we didn’t get to move about the museum as freely as we usually do, which meant we didn’t get to go admire the dinosaur bones like Princess Nagger loves to do.  But she did enjoy watching Dr. Scott Sampson (of Dinosaur Train fame) do his presentation about dinosaurs, as well as see three Dinosaur Train episodes on the big screen.  Dr. Scott was very engaging in his presentation:

Dr. Scott recently made the discovery of a new dinosaur in Utah, a giant plant-eating frilly-horned dinosaur he named Kosmoceratops richardsoni:

Here’s a better picture from the article written about it on Discovery News:

Pretty wild, isn’t it?  Then Dr. Scott talked about feathered dinosaurs, and that birds today are really modern-aged dinosaurs based on what they’ve found in the past:

Then, amidst all the cheers of the kids in the audience, it was time to meet Buddy the T-Rex:

Buddy was apparently wandering around the museum so that kids could meet him up close and personal, but we never did see him in the never-ending crowds of people.  Princess Nagger wasn’t too disappointed; after all, she was in her dinosaur element, got to see Dr. Scott (and Buddy) in person, dug up some fossils in a special dig pit (that she got to take home – the fossils, not the dig pit) , and got to pick out a couple of new dinosaurs for her collection from the gift shop.

In spite of the extremely long lines, the massive crush of people and limited access (because of the crowds) to different parts of the museum, Princess Nagger exclaimed: “Best day ever!”

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Wordful Wednesday is hosted by Seven Clown Circus and Parenting by Dummies – head on over there to check out all the fun wordy posts!