It’s a Good Day for…SCIENCE!

Prehistoric Poop Quest

I took the munchkin (my9-year old niece Rachel) to our favorite place in the city, the St. Louis Science Center yesterday. The big draw was Dinosaurs Unearthed! The last time we went to the Science Center we saw an Omnimax movie about dinosaurs which opened with a brontosaurus thundering into view and then…leaving a giant, steaming pile of poop right in front of the camera. Munchkin loved it. So naturally her goal in the Dinosaurs Unearthed exhibit was to find fossilized dino poop. That’s right: I spent a chunk of my Saturday looking for dino poop.

When we entered the exhibit, the first thing we saw was a giant fossil in situ.

But no poop. Just fake bones in fake rock. At least, I think they were fake. Not being a paleontologist, I couldn’t really tell. It would be cool if it were real, though. The quest for dino poop moved deeper into the exhibit.

Dinosaur horns. Wrong end of the dino. Or maybe dinosaurs are just F***ING METAL!

*ahem* Moving on…

You may not be able to tell from this picture since I took it with my camera phone, but this dinosaur has fur. That dark thing on its head is a clump of leaves. Still no poop.

Rachel found a box full of mulch, exposed plaster “bones” and paint brushes. She covered the bones with the mulch so that other exhibit-goers could pretend to be paleontologists and unearth the fake bones. She’s nice like that. In previous visits to the Science Center, she’s spent time in the hands-on paleontology exhibit, cleaning bones and quizzing the student that was minding the exhibit.

I can’t decide if this picture I took of a dino skeleton is really bad or really artsy. I called it Nessie because it looks like a skeleton of the Loch Ness Monster.

OMG! DINO POOP! Mission accomplished! Rachel was pretty bummed out when I suggested that the poop might not be real fossilized poop. I mean, wouldn’t excrement…melt, rather than fossilize? I can see some of its contents (bones or plant bits) fossilizing, given the right conditions, but would the poop? We debated it for a while, and I finally conceded that it might be real poop, just so we could stop talking about poop.

Non-Poop Related Science Fun

There’s more to the St. Louis Science Center than dinosaurs and their excrement (thank goodness). The next thing Rachel wanted to see was her favorite exhibit of all, the Human Body exhibit, but alas! It was closed for renovation. Rachel was crushed. She loves the hands-on exhibits that let you play with optical and auditory illusions. She also likes the medical exhibits, especially medical equipment and methods from the past.

However, while we were on that floor, we went to the technology section, which had the exhibit that turned out to be her favorite of the day: Designing her own web page. That’s right, building a web page ranked higher than dino poop. My Guardian Geeks would be so pleased!

The other things we simply must see when we’re at the Science Center are the bridge that crosses Highway 40, and the Planetarium. The bridge has cutouts with plexiglass in them that let you look down at the cars racing under the bridge. There are also speed guns so you can check how fast the cars are going. The Planetarium is the home of the Science Center’s space exhibits, starting with a giant model of the planet Mars. To my horror, Rachel declared that Mars was “boring”.

“Boring?!” I said.
“There’s nothing there,” she replied. “It’s just red rocks.”
My little geek isn’t into space? Oh the horror! “It’s more than that! There’s water on the poles, and there may even be life there!”
“When they find people on mars,” she said, “then it’ll be interesting.”
My heart sank. “It’s more likely the life they’ll find will be microbes, or something like that.”
“BOR-RING!”

As we went deeper into the exhibits, she revealed that she thought space was scary, and stuff on Earth was more interesting. Well, OK, if she wants to become a scientist who studies stuff on Earth, that’s totally cool, too. But space isn’t scary! It’s exciting and beautiful and…*sigh* She also thinks science fiction is boring. Oh the humanity. Ah, but there is hope! When she saw in a video by a Gemini space capsule that it was made right here in St. Louis, she was pretty excited.

Here’s a comparison of various rockets and the Arch. The Arch is big. You can ride in a sort of egg car thingie up to the top and look out the windows. We natives use it to find where we parked.

We had fun seeing how much it would cost to send us into space (a lot), and looking at all the space-themed toys from back when I was a kid.

She thinks space is scary but loves the Planetarium. There’s hope yet.

Another big draw for Rachel is the math puzzles. Unfortunately, I didn’t take pictures of her doing those, but they’re lots of fun. I impressed myself by completing a Sudoku puzzle. Let me tell you why that’s impressive: I truly suck at math. In fact, I should probably just get this T-Shirt from Mental_Floss:

Rachel, on the other hand, is a math whiz. And yet, I had to explain Pi to her when she saw all those Pi Day signs around the Science Center. I don’t remember when I learned about Pi in school. Not third grade, so I’ll give Rachel a pass.

Last time we were at the Science Center, Rachel didn’t get a turn in the human-sized hamster wheel they have in the lobby. This time, though, we got there when they were first opening the thing up for play, and Rachel got to be a hamster!

We spent four and half hours there, and Aunt Kathy (me) was getting pretty tired. Not so the 9-year old with the boundless energy. Hearing over the PA that there was a demonstration coming up in the Center Stage area, she convinced me to hurry downstairs to get a good seat. The demo was called Betcha Can’t, in which the scientist pulls people from the audience to take part in physical experiments that demonstrate why you can’t do certain things, like picking a dollar up off the floor while keeping your lower body flush against a wall. The first thing he did was light a candle, then try to extinguish it by blowing through the small end of a funnel. He asked if anyone could tell him why he couldn’t. Rachel’s hand shot up, and he picked her to come up to the stage and tell him why.

The answer? Because blowing through the small end diffused the air out the big end, so the gust of air wasn’t strong enough to blow out the candle. You need to blow through the big end to focus the air through the little end. Rachel was ecstatic that she got picked, and vowed to get me picked, too. I wasn’t quite as sanguine about that as she was. Nevertheless, when the last demonstration came up, she managed to get me picked to come up on stage and squish a penny between my two third fingers while my other fingers were tucked under toward my palms. He told me to see if I could drop the penny without moving any fingers but my third fingers. I knew I wouldn’t be able to, and I knew why, too: My tendons wouldn’t let me. It hurt a lot, but I gamely hammed it up for the audience then went back to my seat to massage my hands!

Yeah, the green blog on the right is me after a long, sweaty day chasing a 9-year old around three levels of the Science Center. Rachel took this picture. She says she doesn’t know how to work my phone, but in the less than two minutes that I was on stage, she took three pictures of me and put each in a funky frame like the one you see above. She doesn’t know how to work my phone. Yeah.

Why Go Anywhere Else?

Every time I ask Rachel where she wants to go, she tells me the Science Center. She never tires of it, and neither do I. There’s a lot to see and do. So if you have a munchkin, or you’re just a geek like me who lives in St. Louis or are planning a visit, make time for the Science Center. I think my munchkin–who’s father contemplated a move out of state–summed it up nicely, “Why would Daddy want to move to Florida where there’s so much cool stuff in St. Louis?”

The St. Louis Science Center can be found on the web at http://www.slsc.org and on Twitter @slsc .