Changes

 As you can imagine, this recreated standoff is popular among visitors. I was lucky to get shots without people in them, but these last two, including people, puts things into perspective on scale.

Nearby, the stained glass over an emergency exit door always catches my eye.

A theatre shows a short documentary on the asteroid that hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago and brought to an end the age of dinosaurs. In all my visits to this museum, I've never watched it. I should remedy that the next time. In the wake of that event, mammals would inherit the Earth. This fossil and recreation looks at the first horse and its gradual evolution. They started appearing some fifty seven million years ago.

The first mammals to have emerged from burrows after surviving the asteroid impact would have lived off scavenged dinosaur meat, gradually evolving into those species we know today- including ourselves. They would have started out small.

A recreation of a dinosaur skull includes such small mammals.

Ancestors of whales started out on land, growing in size, gradually taking more and more to being in the water until they stopped coming out. This process, 40-50 million years ago, resulted in these mammals becoming entirely ocean based, with paws evolving into flippers.  Ancestors of modern day whales are seen here in casts, in various stages of that evolution.