Weekend Adventure

For our first summer adventure, the kids and I visited the Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park. My daughter and I "discovered" it when we were driving down to Garden of the Gods in the spring, and we put it on our list of places we wanted to check out.

It's a small museum, but has a lot of neat stuff. There are displays of fossils here that aren't on display anywhere else in the world, some of which were discovered in Kansas or nearby in Colorado. Some of the fossils are still in plaster jackets, not entirely restored, and some haven't even been officially identified or named yet. There's also a working restoration area where you can watch people working on restorations/reconstructions (no one was working today, but we could still take a look at the workspace).

I was also really interested in the role 3D printing has played in creating models of different critters. This technique was used to create full-body reconstructions as well as reconstructions of skeletons--using a female pterosaur skeleton to project the size and shape of a male, for example. Overall, a fun beginning to our last-year-in-Colorado explorations.

My new phone takes pretty good pics, so you should be able to click on these photos and see big, hi-res versions.