Local Geology Museum

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A few weeks ago, I went to the local geology museum. A+ had been before with his sister, but I and my visiting friend had not, so we thought it would be interesting to go see it. A+ likes looking at rocks and minerals anyways, so visiting again would still be nice ^_^

It's quite a small museum, but they manage to cover a good range of geology artifacts within the small collection. They even had a nice UV/blacklight viewing room, where you could go in and see a a wall display of rocks and minerals under normal lighting, and then press a button that would darken the entire room and cycle the display lighting through different wavelengths so you could watch different materials glow with each lighting change. I wish I had a camera that was able to really capture the display, because it's quite cool, but alas, the photos I took didn't really turn out.

The front part of the museum was full of rock and crystal displays, and was probably my favorite part. They had all sorts of shapes and colors, although the room was a bit dark so the colors were hard to capture accurately with the camera I had. My favorite were definitely the rose-form gypsum crystals.

They had a short section on geological processes and Earth's composition at various points in the geological timeline. They even had a lift-and-smell section, which was fun but a bit gross ~_~ Their fossil section featured a rather sizable cephalopod collection. They also had a small viewing window where you could watch people actually working on artifacts in their lab/office area (if you went on a day when people were in). Nobody was there because it was the weekend, but it's a cool idea to have for visiting school children!

The final exhibit in the museum was the mandatory bones and skeletons section. The collection is modest, but it's very nicely arranged and certainly nice to wander through. They had a T-Rex skull on display, although my favorite was the Glyptodon skeleton. It's so round and cute!

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