Audio By Carbonatix
That the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is hosting the Chicago Field Museum’s Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age is awesome enough — and believe us, the exhibit is truly awesome — but the DMNS has added a whole Snowmass portion, featuring some items that have never been on public display before. And much of the exhibit, which opens today and runs through May 26, is touchable, too. Keep reading for a photo sneak-peek of the offerings. See also: – Web comic: Noah Van Sciver visits the Denver Museum of Nature and Science – 100 Colorado Creatives: Dr. David Grinspoon, Denver Museum of Nature and Science – Mammoth Madness misses the mark at Denver Museum of Nature and Science The entrance is your first clue that there are lots of tusks in this exhibit — mammoth and mastodon tusks. (They are two different creatures, after all.) There are segments about the evolution of mammoths and mastodons — and their relatives, modern African and Asian elephants — that you can touch to feel the wiry hairs. They get bigger. Like, really big. Life-size mammoth/mastodon big. There’s a pygmy version, too. And a display where you can feel what mammoth hair might have felt like. And little people figurines in tents made out of mammoth bones that you can play with. (Yes, people hunted mammoths!) You can see how the pygmy and full-size versions compare while viewing bone displays like this one. And there are other animals included in the exhibit, too. It tells a whole ecological story. For example, massive ancient bears. And lions. But the main event is the mammoth and mastodon extravaganza — displays of teeth so you can compare how they ate… …and what they ate. There’s a reproduction of Lyuba — a famous baby mammoth archaeological find. You’ll see a lot of tusks. Those tusks grow in cone-like shapes — there will be a display table where you can experiment with how that works. And, of course, the aforementioned Colorado-specific content — there will even be artifacts from the Snowmass find that you can touch! They still don’t know how many mastodon skeletons were found in the dig. And they found other animals as well.
Learn more about the exhibit at www.dmns.org/mammoths-and-mastodons.
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