Talking Dinos

On our recent tour of upstate New York, we happened upon the Petrified Creatures Museum of Natural History. It's just a tad different from the other Museum of Natural History we visited in Manhattan a few months back.

In fact, I'd say "museum" is really being generous. It's essentially someone's house. That someone also happens to be a licensed Real Estate Agent -- in case you want to kill two birds with one stone.

The first room you enter is the "gift shop" and it smells like Old People. It has a dark, dingy appearance that makes you feel like you must be the first patron in quite some time and that the gifts for sale have been sitting there a very very long time.

After you fork over $9 per adult, the woman (Stella, I assume?) lets you into her Backyard Museum. This essentially consists of three major areas:

(1) displays of actual Petrified Creatures under wooden shelters. The displays are narrated by a very loud recording that you activate by ringing a doorbell. The "creatures" included trilobites, a horseshoe crab shell, petrified wood, and fern imprints on rock. Fossils indeed, but still not very exciting.

(2) large (though not actual size and not to scale with regard to each other) plaster dinosaurs painted in array of colors (hot pink, turquoise, bright yellow, etc). Each dino had a mailbox painted to match and inside the box was.....a doorbell! When you press the doorbell the dino "talks" to you. Tai didn't notice, but 4 of the 5 dinos had Stella's voice. What he did notice was that the T-rex (pictured below) threatened to eat him and the stegosaurus said that she was not very smart. Poor thing has low self-esteem.

(3) An area in which you could dig for real fossils. Stella even said that if we'd forgotten our digging tools (which we had, shucks!) we could borrow some of hers. We skipped this part in favor of heading back to the car and continuing our journey west.

Oh, and at the very end of the museum path she had a display about minerals that included rectangular slabs of marble, clearly purchased at Home Depot, and a large brown rock with a sign indicating that it was a meteorite. Tai and I thought it just looked like a rock. Makes me wonder if we could open a Meteorite Museum in our backyard....

I have to give her credit actually. She obviously found some cool stuff in her backyard and turned it into a source of income. Hell, I think it was worth the money just for the Unusual Experience and Blog Fodder.