Fossil Museums

[Academia Nut]

While its something like a five hour drive from where I live, the Royal Tyrrell Museum is fucking awesome. It's got nothing but paleontology from the local Badlands and other fairly local fossil sites like the Burgess Shale, which is really cool if weird. If I remember correctly, the general display is set up to progress through complex life on Earth and in Alberta in general, so the fossils start with the Burgess Shale and progress all the way up to wooly mammoths. Not only does it have a T. rex, the museum also found a mass grave of albertosaurs so there are plenty of bones from that species. And not everything is dead, they also made a greenhouse garden only featuring plant species that were alive at the time of the Cretaceous.

It's really cool, and they even have one of their prep labs set up so that the public can see into it via windows. Definitely worth it if you like fossils.

[momochan]

It's not fossil bones so much as fossil footprints, but the Dinosaur Tracks museum in St. George Utah (http://www.dinosite.org/) has an extremely rare impression of a dog-sized dino squatting in the mud. Yes, that's right -- a dinosaur butt print. Well worth a pilgrimage.

[Gil Hamilton]

If you want a first class fossil museum, go to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, they've got an amazing collection, particularly if you like dinosaurs. It's great to walk though, and I've been visiting it since I was little and even named the Stegosaurus (his name is George).

[Ted C]

The Gray Fossil Museum in Gray, TN, displays Miocene fossils from the local dig.

[ray245]

Tyrannosaurus is so awesome.


You know, it really sucks that I have never been into any fossil museum. I mean, we don't even have any fossils here! It totally sucks.

So, yeah. The first thing I'm gonna do when I end up living in Americaland is to visit a goddamn fossil museum and take pictures of all sorts of awesome dead animals!

[As far as I know, it seems like only America has museums full of dinosaurs. Are there even any fossil museums in Asia?]

What about china?

[The Grim Squeaker]

Nat History in London and the Nat Hist in New York city. Also the one in Cambridge (UK).
Awesome one and all, would anyone object if I uploaded a few pics of skeletons from the Cambridge one?

[Molyneux]

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a world class fossil collection, ranging from Cambrian jawless fish to hominids, and including all the "brand name" dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals. It takes up the entire fourth floor of the building and is laid out in such a way that the visitor walks through the history of vertebrate life. That's not including the Barosaurus mother and baby and the Allosaurus in the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Rotunda (the main entrance hall on Central Park West), or the ten story building full of fossils in storage (obviously, regular visitors can't see those).

I still remember going into that museum as a kid, and walking into the Roosevelt Rotunda, and looking up...and up...and UP...at this giant freakin' skeleton, and having my mind melt into a mushy morass except for one thought: "Cool..."