Hello my nerdy birdies!
I hope you all had an excellent weekend, whether that was relaxing or getting up to something exciting.
I visited my local Natural History Museum over the past weekend, and thought I’d try out something new on my blog. Essentially I am going to take my favourite photos from a day out and compile them into a blog post.
Photos will either be taken with my iPhone 12, or my Olympus Pen E-PL10. I do some light editing for white balance and colour correction using the app VSCO on my phone.
With all that being said – let’s dive right into it!
Just to make things a little easier on myself, I will be posting these in the order that you would see them walking through the Museum.
First up we have the fossils of an unsuspecting Dryosaurus being hunted by a Ceratosaurus. I really enjoy this display because of the way it so succinctly shows the food chain. The herbivore eating the plant and the carnivore preying on the herbivore.
Next up with have the head and neck of an Allosaurus. These guys are more closely related to Velociraptors than larger carnivores like the T-Rex. I enjoy the perspective of this photo thanks to the positioning of the Sauropod in the mural.
Above is the skull of the Edmontosaurus that lays as the prey in the T-Rex display. It’s widely considered that these large herbivores were quite adept at avoiding larger predators such as the Tyrannosaur, but that doesn’t mean some unlucky fellows could not have met the same fate.
I just thought this photo looked quite poignant with the flowers in the foreground.
The last of my dinosaur snapshots. The Tyrannosaurus pair is probably one of my favourite of the dinosaur displays in the museum. I just really love the staging, with the two facing off over a kill. Which would have been victorious I wonder?
Above is the upper skeleton of an Irish Elk. This extinct species is the largest species of deer to have ever roamed the Earth. I love the antlers of this creature, and I love the thought that it influences Irish folklore in some kind of way.
I like this photo because of the shadow the Elk casts across the ceiling. It’s almost spectral in appearance.
This display is from the Hall of Botany, which describes the importance of various ecosystems that can be found in North America.
One such importance is butterflies and their role as pollinators, allowing plants to thrive, and how certain kinds of “weeds” attract butterflies. An example of this is Milkweed, which butterfly larvae like to eat.
I just happen to think that it’s also a really pretty plant.
Another from the Hall of Botany shows a close-up of an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail sitting on the pretty yellow-white flowers of the dogwood tree. I really like dogwood flowers, they look like the edges have been touched with a small flame.
From the Hall of North American Wildlife is this Red-Shouldered Hawk, holding a field mouse in its beak. I adore birds of prey, and the plumage on this species is especially pretty.
The last part of the Museum that I will be sharing snapshots of is the Hall of Birds.
The first of these Peregrine Falcon, which is actually my favourite species of Bird of Prey. There used to be a family of them that lived on the mountain behind the house I grew up in, and you could catch sight of them every now and again.
Dodos have fascinated me for years, and I would love to visit the island of Mauritius to learn more about them. These birds went extinct in 1662, thanks to over hunting and habitat destruction by humans.
The last photo I’ll be sharing today is this one of an Atlantic Puffin and a Chinstrap Penguin.
Atlantic Puffins are really amusing birds who essentially have no fear, due to having no natural predators. If you haven’t already you should look up Puffin interactions with photographers, it is some of the cutest stuff you will see.
As a nerdy side note, Porgs actually exist in the Star Wars universe because of Puffins being present while some scenes were being filmed. It was then cheaper for the VFX artists to turn them into something else instead of edit them out.
And that’s it for my first snapshot post. I hope to do more of these in the future with other places that I visit, and maybe I’ll try the format to share some convention adventures.
I hope you enjoyed and until next time – stay curious, and nerdy my friends!
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