Remember the short-faced bear I mentioned yesterday as part of the dig site? Well, the full sized replica of the bear's skeleton is the first thing you see when you enter the next room, the display area of the museum.
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| Short-Faced Bear Skeleton |
Across from that there's a "tent" made of replica bones and an animal skin roof. You can go inside this exhibit and take a look, but it was awfully dark in there.
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| Tent of Bones |
But I have to say the most dominating feature of the room is the life sized replica of a Columbian mammoth. It's pretty impressive. The people in the bottom of that picture are random strangers, but there were too many people to get a shot without someone in the photo.
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| Life-Sized Mammoth Display |
Behind the big mammoth there's a replica of the pygmy mammoth. To my surprise, this guy wasn't much taller than I am. If they still existed today, I could ride one into battle comfortably, you know, if it came down to that. He was kind of cute, anyhow, reminding me of a baby elephant.
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| Pygmy Mammoth Display |
In the same display as the little mammoth there's a pile of pygmy mammoth bones, showing what one of these fossils looked like when it was found.
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| Pygmy Mammoth Bones |
Beside that there is an assembled pygmy mammoth skeleton.
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| Pygmy Mammoth Skeleton |
And then I got the other side of the big mammoth just for the fun of it. There were still strangers in the picture, but luckily they were out of the way of the mammoth.
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| Other Side of Life-Sized Mammoth |
And now three pictures to gross us all out. The first is of a preserved mammoth's brain. It is a replica of the only preserved mammoth brain ever found. There are only two replicas of this brain in the world and only one on display in a museum.
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| "If I only Had a Brain" |
The second photo is of one of two replicas of mummified baby mammoths. This first of the two was the youngest baby mammoth mummy ever found. She was one-month old and when she died the body froze and was well preserved until she was eventually discovered.
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| Frozen Remains |
The last is of the second replica of a mummified mammoth, only the second mummified woolly mammoth ever found. It's interesting to me how well preserved these animals were before being discovered.
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| More Frozen Remains |
And that's all I have for the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota. I'd definitely recommend stopping there if you ever get the chance. It's a very interesting place and there was more to see than I got pictures of, or posted here. In fact, I wish I had gotten more pictures, and we had spent a little more time here, but I didn't feel all that great by the time we got through this much, so, unfortunately, we packed back into the car and headed off to our next destination.
If nothing else, I wish I had felt more up to it and taken the time to read more of the info plaques in the museum. They have some very fascinating stuff in this place.
~SilverStar-Burst
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