Last week, we went to the Museum of York County with Brad’s aunt and cousin. We’d been there recently, but the Ice Age exhibit was closed. It’s open now, so we went back to see it! Brad and I have seen it before, but his aunt and cousin hadn’t.
The Museum of York County is a natural history museum, with lots of taxidermy. Well, there’s nothing taxidermy-able from the Ice Age, so instead they used fossils to guide interpretations of what Ice Age animals would have looked like! It’s a very cool museum, and we love going there!
Brad got a picture of us getting ready to go into the museum, and it nicely shows the setup I have with my phone mounted on the anti-tip bar of my wheelchair to get those low shots of Felix. You can see my phone recording Felix just above my rear wheel. I am wearing a champagne colored sequin dress (this one is longer so you can’t see up it!) and Felix is wearing his galaxy vest. I have fairy wings on my wheelchair.
We skipped most of the museum and went straight to the Ice Age exhibit. To get down the ramp to the exhibit, we have to go through the Naturalist Center room. This room has some giant taxidermied bears in it! Last time Felix was afraid of the bears, but this time he didn’t care about them at all, yay! Here are a few pictures of us in the Naturalist room. There’s one at the entrance with a leafy sky, several in front of the bears, some of Brad’s cousin looking at exhibits, and a couple of Felix and me in front of some type of giant ox type thing.
Then we entered the “Ice Age Carolinas” exhibit. It’s a very dark exhibit, with strange animals around every corner. Felix did a good job of walking with me into the exhibit.
The first part of the exhibit has my favorite animal of the bunch—the Terror Bird! I love this guy, he’s so weird looking! He’s in an exhibit with several other more “today” looking creatures like a type of zebra. Felix had a hard time ignoring Brad’s aunt, so I had to do a lot of training of him to do paws up and such on my wheelchair so he didn’t try to go say hi! He wasn’t scared by the Terror Bird at all!
On our way to the main display hall, we passed a giant Armadillo that kids can climb on. So of course I put Felix on there and posed! They had a skeleton of a giant bear, and then recreations of giant creatures like sloths and mammoths (the prairie mammoth, not the wooly one!). There was a wild pig statue on the ground that Felix enjoyed posing next to.
At the end of the hall there was an exhibit showing how some of the animals from the ice age went extinct, others evolved, and others moved to other parts of the world. That is a cool exhibit, though we didn’t linger there.
We also explored the fossil area. They had a section that looked like you were hunting for fossils and then an area that was a fossil lab that showed how they extracted and reassembled the skeletons. Felix did a good job in these sections, though the area to get to the discoverable fossils was very narrow, so he had to go in front!
After we got done taking these pictures of Brad’s cousin moving the rocks to see the discoverable fossils, suddenly a very loud alarm went off! They have the whole exhibit alarmed so if you go too close to the exhibits there will be a horrible noise and someone comes to tell you to behave.
We couldn’t figure out what we had done! Brad’s aunt had been in the middle of the walkway. I was clumsily going down a ramp and nearly running into a wall with nothing on it that should alarm, and Tamara was closing all the rocks she had opened.
The alarm scared the pants off us! One of the curators came to check on us, and told us that the alarm near the fossil place was extra sensitive so it was probably Brad’s cousin’s fault. At least that’s what we all told her to make ourselves feel better LOL!
Stay tuned to my next blog entry for the rest of our trip where we hung out in one of the other taxidermy rooms, watched a show in the planetarium, visited the gift shop, and went back for a few more pictures of the Ice Age exhibit!