Ben's Gift to Humanity

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REASON 4 TO VISIT #ULTIMATEDINOS: THE CURRENT STATE OF PALAEONTOLOGY!

Museums are great and awesome, and beacons of science and education. But, also, sometimes, you know, well, they get old. Not old as in dusty (though that does happen), or old as in lame (because no matter what history is always special), but old as in what they hold isn’t accurate anymore.

We’re all familiar with the dinosaur dragging its tail and the Brontosaurus. We’re familiar with the Tyrannosaurus rex with its arms pointed the wrong way or the the raptors without feathers. These inaccurate views were common place five decades ago, and really, were still being displayed into the 2000s, long after these ideas were disproved. It’s not as if curators behind exhibits don’t want to stay up to date, but that they have constraints in terms of budget or time, or the other myriad of things that come up when you work in a museum.
AN ASIDE

To be completely honest, it’s hard to develop a permanent gallery in a museum, and keep it up to date. The natural sciences, specifically, change so much, as our knowledge continues to develops. I will even go so far as to say, that maybe the only way to stay up to date in for museums to focus on rotating galleries instead of permanent ones. #but that’s for another time

It’s interesting that in the end, museums don’t necessarily showcase history and science, but history and science as was interpreted when the gallery was created. #but that’s also something we can talk about that another time

So what I absolutely love about Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants of Gondwana ( btw, a gallery that’s about to go travel the globe, allowing plenty of time between stops for updates) is that it features palaeontology as it stands right now. This is probably one of the most accurate and up to date dinosaur galleries in the entire world. We’re talking dinosaurs with feathers, caring parents, beasts displayed with complex behavior and animals with such incredible diversity.

KID SCIENCE?

#ultimatedinos also displays palaeontology as a rather deep science. Often palaeontology is viewed as “kid science” in that it only matters to kids. But really palaeontology tells us so much about all sorts of things:

evolution

climate change

the origins of life

the environment

Palaeontology is not only a gateway “drug” into science, but so many different fields and ideas and I believe #ultimatedinos does a fabulous job showing this.

Make sure to check out the rest of our 28 Reasons to Visit #ultimatedinos! The greatest dinosaur exhibit ever shown (at least in my personal opinion) closes March 17th. More info here!

Have you visited? What’s your favourite part of #ultimatedinos?