Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Feathered Dinos at the ROM
After I finished teaching my Saturday morning class at the U. of T. I headed over to the ROM to meet up with Erika and the kids. It was the first day of the Feathered Dinosaurs exhibition, open to members only on the first day.

I met everybody downstairs in the cafeteria, and met Nichola, one of Vanessa's friends from her swim class, who would be joining us for the exhibition. Annie was a bit nervous about going to exhibition, likely because she may have just thought that maybe, just maybe, they were alive.

They weren't of course, but the opening foyer has an impressive display of large raptor-like bipedal dinos brandishing sharp teeth, nasty looking claws and covered in feathers (no pics unfortunately, as cameras are not allowed). Annie insisted on being carried inside for this part of the show, and I suspect she was relieved when none of the dinos models moved.

Much of the actual exhibition was a blur, since the kids generally rushed from one set of fossils to another, always asking me or Erika what it was and how old it was ("125 million years". "Wow!") They did stay for the short movie presentations interspersed throughout the exhibition, unfortunately read by a droning I-am-reading-too-carefully-from-a-script voice in a mid-west accent, which is where this traveling exhibition started from. The presentations did explain how the fossils came to be, the changes in the way we think of how dinos looked, and made a convincing case for feathered dinos being a wider genera than was first thought. Details will have to wait until the next time I can come back -- sans kids -- and spend more time actually reading the info presented along with the exhibits.

The exhibition was great, including the obligatory cast of the famous Archaeopteryx fossil that started people thinking about birds and dinosaurs, and an amazing array of slates featuring finely detailed fossils, including a few famous I recognized from Scientific American articles from a few years ago.

The girls all had a good time, though we essentially dashed through the exhibit. They all got into the "dino dig" in the rejuvenated Discovery Room upstairs, where they could brush sand away from casts of dino bones.

Noticed that the old dinosaur hall was closed off, an "under construction" sign on the door. Will have to find the time to put together the "virtual dinosaur gallery" from the pics I took on the last day it was open a couple of months ago.