HMNS-low light practice

Having a day off today, I decided to head to the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences and check out the Magna Carta while it's still here and the still relatively new Morian Hall of Paleontology. Previously, they just kind of had one small room, now they've really expanded to include all kinds of unique specimens from the Pre-Cambrian to today. HMNS is home to some notable specimens, including the 'Jurassic Mom' (fossilized marine reptile with a complete egg clutch in her belly), a T-rex with intact fossilized skin-which I can't remember as there were four of them, and the most complete Triceratops skeleton-also with fossilized skin (the 'mummy' trike) The new hall had very low lighting, so it gave me a chance to kind of play around with low shutter speeds and Lightroom

One thing I was quite impressed with was how the posed the skeletons. Most museums I see just kind of have them in random poses. Here, they really put effort into recreating action scenes from millions of years ago...

Such as this case of a T-rex charging a Quetzalcoatlus nest, unaware of another Quetzalcoatlus swooping in to take him out. If you've never seen a skeleton of a Quetzalcoatlus...prepare to have your jaw dropped when you see one in person. They are MASSIVE. Think the size of a giraffe...

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Another pose I found my self liking was the Allosaurus charging the Stegosaurus...purely due to the way the Stegosaurus was rearing up at it. (You can also see some of the exhibits had murals to show what the posed specimens may have looked like while they were alive.

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The T-rex/Ankylosaurus battle. This one is unique because the T-rex remains found were one where the T-rex had 3/4 of its tail bitten off! Nicknamed the 'bobtail Rex'

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The last truly epic pose was the mammoths and humans..it just kind of..well...look..

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That does it for the more 'epic' poses. There are some more shots I am quite proud of, mostly of the 'big' Rex and the Triceratops-as well as 'Jurrassic Mom'.

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Oh..right. Something about the Magna Carta.

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