Sunday, June 24, 2012

Pleistocene Park?

Some years back, we took the kids (however many of 'em we had at the time) to the Big City Zoo an hour-and-a-half down the road. Which was a mildly hefty admission all by itself, even after we sorted out who got the 'student' fee, and who was an 'adult' (and just between you and me, why do 13-year-olds count as 'adults' for zoo/museum/theater admissions, but nowhere else?), and who got the 'too-little-to-understand-anything-anyway' free admission.

The day we went, there was also a Dino-mation exhibit (I think that's what it was called), with the realistic-looking mechanical dinosaurs, which charged a separate admission. We'd seen the Dino-mation exhibit a couple times before, at the little science museum in Our Town, but that had been a pretty stripped-down exhibit, due to the small space available, and we (some of us, anyway), were looking forward to seeing The Whole Schmeer.  I didn't really appreciate the separate admission, though.  As many kids as we had with us, it put us in a tough spot to stand at the entrance to the exhibit trying to decide who we'd spend an extra admission on, and who not.  In the end, I took the three oldest kids with me; Jen professed not to be all that interested anyway (or at least, not interested enough to pay the extra admission), so she took the opportunity to get off her feet for a bit, and look after the young ones.

The four of us really enjoyed the exhibit.  The 'dinosaurs' were very realistic-looking; they even had a little 'side exhibit' explaining the ways that they had simulated their skin.  And of course, they programmed their movements for maximum effect, having them look menacingly in the direction of their viewers, and maybe even unleash a roar in our direction.  It was very cool.  And of course, there was a little gift-shop at the end, where the kids convinced me to buy a realistic-looking (and vastly over-priced) T-Rex hand-puppet, which in subsequent years made some very, uh, entertaining appearances at family gatherings, and such. . .

Once we had finished with Dino-mation, we were released back out into the Zoo proper, to continue our observations of the actual living creatures - elephants and hippopotami, giant tortoises, penguins, and the like.  Even a wolverine.

Now, one of the Dino-mation critters was a woolly mammoth, which was very realistic-looking, and, as it happened (mammoths having been pretty big critters, and all), stuck up above the surrounding wall which was supposed to keep the riff-raff from seeing the extra stuff they hadn't paid for.  So, a bit later, we were walking through the part of the zoo adjacent to the special exhibit, and Jen spied the mechanical mammoth, in all its woolly, tuskular splendor, sticking up above the wall, turning its head and trumpeting. She got all excited, pointing excitedly and saying, "Look! They've got a MAMMOTH!! How did they get a MAMMOTH!?!" So I had to explain to her that, no, it wasn't, you know, a REAL mammoth, 'cuz, like, mammoths are, you know, extinct and all. . .

Have I mentioned before how really, really much I love my wife?

But you know, in a 'Jurassic Park' vein, there are lots of remarkably well-preserved mammoths, frozen into the Siberian tundra.  Thus, there is a fairly readily-accessible supply of mammoth DNA available, and much easier to get at than looking for amber-encased mosquitoes, if anybody wanted to clone one.  (And just for fun, here's the Wikipedia article on mammoths, including recent/current attempts to do just that. . .)

14 comments:

  1. That's odd.....I posted earlier today and it is gone! Anyway, I can be gullible as well, although I'd like to think that I'd realize a wooly mammoth in something called a 'Dino-mation Exhibit' was not for real!

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  2. Bijoux - In her young life, my beloved wife has had some real howler-moments of gullibility; I had to seriously cool it with teasing her over it ('cuz, you know, I've been known to enjoy me some teasing, from time to time. . .)

    But, in her defense, she hadn't gone thru the Dino-mation exhibit, and it was far from obvious, from the vantage point at which she saw the 'mammoth', that it was part of the special exhibit; it really did look a lot like a real mammoth. Except, you know, for the whole 'extinct' thing. . .

    (And mammoths, after all, aren't dinosaurs. . .)

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  3. I think it would be really cool to see a live wooly mammoth, but I sometimes wonder if things didn't go extinct for some very good reasons and maybe trying to bring one back alive, like some modern Frank Buck, might lead to complications we never would have envisioned - weird mammoth diseases or something.

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  4. Oh, I hear ya, Suldog. Don't mess with Mother Nature, and all that. . .

    My understanding is that mammoths were basically hunted to extinction. I mean, when a critter has got that much meat, all on four stout legs, well, why mess with moose and elk and such, right? 'Course, a 2-year gestation period (assuming they were similar to elephants in that regard) means that replacing the killed ones is not a quick process. And the dumb things chose a singularly inhospitable habitat for themselves. . .

    So, bringing them back could possibly be construed as righting a huge cosmic wrong. . . Yeah, that's it. . .

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  5. And now, I'm looking at the title for this post and thinking of 'Pleistocene porters with looking-glass eyes'. . .

    Must've been those brownies I ate over the weekend. . .

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  6. mammoths we lack but we got mastodons around here.

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  7. Lime - Well, as far as I'm concerned, one woolly, prehistoric elephantine critter is pretty much as good as another. . .

    One of the finalists for the name of our local minor-league baseball team was 'Mid-Michigan Mammoths', since a wonderfully complete mammoth skeleton (now on display at the university museum) was unearthed on a farm within 20 miles of here. . .

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  8. Ya know, I've tried 3 times to respond to this post. This'll be the last try-

    Have always found it a dubious claim that hunting caused Mammoth's extinction. I mean, even today our populations do not cover enough of that inhospitable area to effectively eradicate 'em. Ya know? But what do I know?

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  9. Hi, Xavier. Sheesh, I've been wondering where you were, just a little. Is Blogger sabotaging my commenters? Anyway, I'm glad you finally got thru. . .

    The Wikipedia article I linked writes their extinction off to hunting pressure and loss of habitat. So, if there's less and less room to live in, and you're being hunted. Or, you know, maybe the females just all had headaches at the same time. . .

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  10. Well yeah, they said that. But an area of 800,000 sq? That's still pretty impressive for the small pockets of folks in that day to manage to eradicate 'em.

    And, you know, what about the 2 pods on islands they talk about? The dwarfs and such .... nothing there seemed to hint at us. All sounds fishy to me particularly when they gots so many of 'em still on ice!!

    I'm thinking maybe we should be investigating Frigidaire.

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  11. Well, I don't really know enough to comment intelligently much beyond what I've already done (and it's an open question as to how intelligent my earlier comments really were). Bison were hunted to near-extinction, and I'm guessing there were a LOT more of them than there were mammoths. But, as I said above. . .

    As Fox Mulder might say, The Truth is Out There. . .

    And in point of actual fact, mammoths are, indeed, extinct; and pretty recently, at that, given cave paintings, etc, of humans hunting 'em. . .

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  12. Doncha just love those moments when your brain decides to be all CUTE instead of all Reasonable?

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  13. Well, Flutter, I'm not sure I can identify; I don't think my brain would ever admit to being 'cute'. . .

    ;)

    But, yeah, I've seen it happen. . .

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  14. OK, OK, I'll leave it alone for now ... ;-)

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