Air and Space Museum

A couple weekends ago, I went to the annex of the Air and Space museum in D.C. It was mostly underwhelming. Really, most of the innovations with regards to flight technology are intrinsically tied to innovations involving killing people or in moving extremely rich people extremely quickly. The first thing I saw was this:


The SR 71 Blackbird, famous for being the preferred airplane by both the X-Men and my brother, who had a MicroMachines version. Upon seeing it, I snapped a photo and sent it to my brother telling him that the real thing was larger. He informed me that he'd take two.

( Then came the bit that mattered )

Museum of Natural History

While in DC, I also got to go to the Museum of Natural History. Sadly, the galleries were closed for the after hours event, but I did get to look at the central area. Like most museums of this type, it was mostly full of dead things and imprints of dead things. I also couldn't use my flash, so I didn't take many photos and those that I did take weren't very good. The set is here


Even though it was dead, I was thrilled to see a true coelacanth. I'll likely never get to see a living one and, as you can tell, the glass in the display has some dispersion that made it hard to take photos. It was also hard to see in real life. A better photo of the same fish, before it was put on display, can be seen here. However, it seems right that a fish that was extinct for over 60 million years and then discovered in time for us to watch the entire order go extinct as we destroy the oceans, be hard to see. It was lost in the mists of past, it will soon be lost to the mists of the future. It should be blurry in the present.


I like trilobytes almost as much as ammonites. Were it not for the general creepiness of having a house full of dead things, I'd collect them. There's a class structure to fossils. The ones that people see in school are poor quality. Those in the local museums are a bit better. The national-level museums have higher quality specimens. However, the absolute best ones are in the private for-appointment-only fossil-specific art galleries. I am lucky enough to have been in two*. However, not having a spare $200,000 laying around, I did not purchase anything. After that gallery, these trilobytes were some of the best I've seen. They've been nicely extracted and you can see all sorts of neat little details.

* Technically one and it's reboot five years later.


Here's the same one from the side.


This is an example of how museum lighting isn't ideal for photography.


Luckily, I could see this one from the side as well.


Here's the classic trilobyte, looking all trilobytey and inviting us to invent a time machine to go see what it looked like alive.


The tridentbytes ruled the five** seas until they went extinct and Poseidon had to take over.

** Do you know how cool it is to be able to do a Google Image search for "map of earth during the cretaceous" just to make that joke. This whole Internet thing is pretty neat.