NEBRASKA! GIANT MAMMALS! AMAZING!!

Elephant Hall display

Monday, Aug. 27, 2018

We got up a little earlier today so we could have time to spend in the Nebraska State Museum on the University of Nebraska campus in Lincoln. We drove 3 straight hours, getting close by at around noon, and stopping for lunch first. Then we negotiated the roads in the city, including on the campus of the university, until we came to the museum. It was located right by Memorial Stadium, the home of the Cornhuskers, which holds 90,000 screaming fans when it is full (and it has been sold out for every game since 1962!!)

Our problem was not 90,000 fans, however, but a parking lot made for cars, not for RVs. There actually was a section clearly labeled "For Museum guests ONLY!", but all the spaces were metered and were, of course, normal size slots for cars. We were lucky, I guess, because those spaces were half empty, including a stretch of about 10 of them in a row at the end of the parking lot. So we decided to park parallel to the side instead of like a normal car, and take up four whole spaces. This worked fine-- except of course, we had to stuff quarters into 4 parking meters to make ourselves "legal". Luckily, we also had a LOT of quarters (despite using up quite a few doing laundry last week, and using up others when we ran out of singles and needed to pay $12/night for camping at Stillwater campground.)

Early four-tusker elephant

Anyway, we each simultaneously slipped quarters into the meters until we'd put in enough for an hour (each quarter was only good for 12 minutes!!) I added a sign on the window for good measure saying "Visiting Museum", and we went inside.

We were immediately WOWed!!!  The museum is largely a museum of paleontology, and it turns out (who knew???) that Nebraska is a huge repository of... well, HUGE bones! They have found a complete fossil record of the development of elephants in Nebraska. There were more than 10 complete skeletons of elephants, beginning with some with 4 tusks (instead of only two), shorter legs, etc. and going to mastodons, mammoths, and modern elephants. ALL of which developed in Nebraska! They were fabulous!

Giant Mastodon (modern elephants in front of him)

In the next room over, we saw camel skeletons-- it seems a giant camel evolved in Nebraska, too. It was only later that they migrated into other continents. The llama, also, is a descendant of this camel; it ended up in South America. So both the dromedary (one hump) and bactrian (two hump) camels which are seen in the middle east and Asia, and the llama in South American, developed from the giant camel in Nebraska!

There were other galleries-- giant rhinos, horses (we should have come here instead of the Hagerman Fossil Beds!), one of "weird animals and fish", including a shark with teeth that looked like a buzz saw blade, large armored fish, and a 5 foot tall invertebrate of some sort which was just horrible looking! Speaking of horrible, there were several animals, some dead-end evolutionary "experiments", with truly ugly skulls. There were also skeletons of a giant sloth, a giant deer, and some kind of huge round THING, I can't remember what exactly it was (I'm posting a photo.)

Giant Camel

This floor of the museum was so utterly fascinating that we spent well over an hour in it--I had to run out and shove MORE quarters in our parking meters! We had about 30 minutes left to go upstairs where the "real dinosaurs" were-- including a stegosaurus which came from, guess where? Utah's Dinosaur National Monument! So we had visited the place it was buried, and here was the skeleton itself! They also had an Allosaurus from there as well. And in the room next door, there was a plesiosaur neck in the floor--it went from one end of the gallery to the other.

Plesiosaur skull and body found in Nebraska

This museum has a number of really rare fossils, such as a fossilized early deer which was pregnant, and the bones of the fetus were also fossilized. There is a giant something that I never heard of, which is very rare, and an entire flying dinosaur skeleton still embedded in rock for display-- it is rare to find an entire skeleton in one piece, so to speak. All in all, we simply were boggled by the richness of the fossil record in Nebraska, and plan to come back again. For one thing, we didn't find out until today about the Ashfall Fossil Beds in northern Nebraska. We easily could have stopped to see them on our way west a few weeks ago. They are a paleological version of Pompeii-- a volcano erupted in Idaho, killing hundreds of now extinct animals at a waterhole area in what is now Nebraska. I took a photo of one fossil from the site which was in the museum, but I am avid to go see the original site now, which, I believe, is also enclosed inside a building like Dinosaur National Monument is.

"Round thing"-- a Glyptodont, related to an armadillo

There was also an exhibit highlighting the fossils found through the State's "Highway Paleontology Program," where there is cooperation between the state and the scientists when new roads are being put it-- the paleontolgists work side by side with the road construction crews to deal with fossils that may be uncovered at the time of the work being done. It is one of the first cooperative programs of this type in the country. All in all, this was one of the most fascinating museums I've ever seen, and just standing in the "Elephant Hall" was to be in awe. As Joe said, Nature is truly incredible! This museum is worth a special visit-- I hope to go back there someday soon. We had to skip entire galleries due to lack of time and energy (and quarters!)

Complete flying dinosaur skeleton

By the time we finished up at the museum, Joe was pretty wiped out (he'd done almost all the morning's driving), so we found a park to stop in while we looked at our options for the rest of the day. There are a LOT of places to "overnight" in parking lots near Omaha (Walmart, Cabela's, Cracker Barrel, and even the highway rest areas), but we needed electricity tonight--it was in the 90s and SO hot, and we knew we wanted AC tonight.  In the end, we decided to go to a county park campground near Omaha, about 45 minutes further east. But when we got there, it was full.

Plesiosaur paddle

Allosaurus

Stegasaurus from Dinosaur Nat. Monument in Utah

Fossilized animal burrows (bottom one has animal remains in it)

A very weird animal-- I have no idea what!

So we did MORE thinking and mapping, and headed east again, crossing the Missouri River into Iowa until we came to another county park, Arrowhead Park in Neola, IA. We were lucky yet again to get one of the last spots available. So we are in Iowa now, about 2 hour's drive from tomorrow's destination. I can't upload today's photos because we have very little connection for some reason, but I will certainly do that. The skeletons we saw today were, as I said, mind-boggling! If they are not here when you read this blog, come back again!

I have no idea what this is!