This week was planned from the beginning of the summer, since we had a week before school started, but I was so exhausted from our trip and had so much work to catch up on that I really should have called it Summer Theme Week #11 Sleep.
Anyway, we read dinosaur books and watched a few dinosaur movies, and I did take them to the Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park. We had a young teenage tour guide this time, which was new, but I did find out things about the museum I wouldn’t have known otherwise and he made it fun.
A few cool things he said was that a new species similar to a triceratops had just been discovered in 2013, and it didn’t even have a name yet! He also told us about wounds the dinosaurs had suffered that they could identify from their bones, including a puncture wound in a t-rex’s head that didn’t kill it!
The owner of this museum apparently studied the Pachycephalosaurus and discovered recently that these dinosaurs couldn’t have used their hard skulls to compete for females like big horn sheep, due to the weakness of their neck structure. So the new theory is that they used the skull plate to defend themselves by ramming into the underbelly of attacking dinosaurs. For me, looking at this exhibit-in-progress, I don’t think knocking the wind out of one raptor is going to save this guy.
This place also has amazing kid-friendly activities from dino bone rubbings to magnetic create-your-own-dino boards.
We were here all afternoon.
