At the Natural History Musuem

There were other things to see at the Natural History Museum besides the butterflies. Like that small little diamond thingie.

Last of the Butterflies

This butterfly decided to land right on this guy's forehead. And then decided to stay for a while. I think it rested there for a good five minutes.

More from the Butterfly Pavilion

 It always amazes me how delicate butterflies. Yet they are so incredibly beautiful too.

The Butterfly Pavilion at the Natural History Museum

After the National Archives I went to see the butter at the Natural History Museum.

Here's a little more about it:

Take a stroll among live butterflies and exotic plants! Located adjacent to Partners in Evolution, this tropical oasis offers visitors a rare opportunity to get close to a variety of living butterflies from all over the world.

 What an amazing place. The pictures will show just how amazing.

Everywhere a Butterfly

You had to be careful where you talked and careful moving around if one landed on you. They seemed to like to land on people. A couple of the kids there were actually scared of them. I guess they thought they would bite or something. But most everyone just marveled at how beautiful they were.

More Butterflies

That's all for now. I'll have more pictures later. I will say the butterflies seemed to like me. They landed on my hat, my coat and my backpack. But one guy had an even closer encounter with one.

At the Natural History Museum

I really enjoy wandering around the Smithsonian Museums. It's like visiting an old friend. Many things are the same but every once in a while you run into something new.

Here are some pictures of the galleries we went through today.

Natural History Museum — The Fossil Lab

This is new at the Natural History Museum or at least new to me. It is also so very cool.

The FossiLab:

FossiLab is a real laboratory located at the back of the Dinosaur and Ancient Seas halls of the National Museum of Natural History.  Paleontologists and volunteers working in this glass-enclosed space unpack new fossil shipments from the field, prepare fossils for study by removing the rock matrix that encases them, piece together broken fossils, and perform many other fossil preparation and conservation tasks. Visitors to the Museum can watch us work, talk to us about what we are doing, and ask questions.  

Here are a couple of pictures of what was being worked on when we were there.

Here you see the guy working on the fossil. There is a description of what he's working on and a picture of what the dinosaur looked like.

Here's a close up on a video screen of what he's doing.

More from My Days Off — Freer Gallery of Art

One of the lesser know museums at the Smithsonian is the Freer Gallery of Art:

The Freer houses over 25,000 objects spanning 6,000 years of history, including but not limited to ancient Egyptian stone sculpture and wooden objects, ancient Near Eastern ceramics and metalware, Chinese paintings and ceramics, Korean pottery and porcelain, Japanese folding screens, Persian manuscripts, and Buddhist sculpture. Collections span from the Neolithic to modern eras. Over 11,000 objects from the Freer|Sackler collections are now fully searchable and available online.

It is a great museum. Has a really great collection and is just a fun museum to go to in part because there are not a huge number of people in it. It also gives you access to the Sackler Gallery as well.

More from My Days Off — Natural History Museum

Last Tuesday after I voted I set out again to the Mall to play tourist. Here are a few pictures from my visit to the Natural History Museum.

I always like to go and see the gems especially the Hope Diamond but also on display at the National Gem collection:

• the Marie Antoinette diamond earrings
• a 263-carat diamond necklace and a diadem (tiara) given by Napoleon to Empress Marie-Louise
• the Janet Annenberg Hooker fancy yellow diamonds
• 2 topaz crystals from Brazil, weighing 111 and 70 pounds respectively, and a 23,000-carat cut-and-polished topaz
• a 423-carat sapphire set in diamonds
• the DeYoung red and pink diamonds
• the 127-carat Portuguese diamond, the largest cut diamond in the collection
• the Rosser Reeves ruby
• the Carmen Lucia Ruby, weighing 23.1-carats, is one of the largest faceted Burmese rubies known to exist. The stone is set in platinum and flanked by 2 triangular colorless diamonds measuring 1.1 and 1.27 carats.

One of the really impressive places to visit.