Earth Experience - Middle Tennessee Museum of Natural History (77 Photos!)

One of the benefits of working for yourself is the ability to create your own schedule. This morning @corinnestokes decided to take the kids to a museum she heard about, and I took a break from work to join them.

From the outside, you'd never believe the Earth Experience had anything like this. In fact, it looks like a random warehouse.

I forgot to take a picture of the outside while we were there, but this Google street view image is what we saw. It's a non-profit run by all volunteers.

They have some amazing dinosaur fossils!

My son Devon absolutely loved it. He knew more about them then all of us, I think.

One of the things I learned was that petrified "wood" isn't really wood at all! Neither are what we consider dinosaur "bones". They are also petrified. It's really just rock, created through the process of permineralization:

Permineralization is a process of fossilization in which mineral deposits form internal casts of organisms. Carried by water, these minerals fill the spaces within organic tissue. Because of the nature of the casts, permineralization is particularly useful in studies of the internal structures of organisms, usually of plants.

These Crinoid stems come from a Crinoid which you can see in the sculpture above.

Here's another amazing example of petrified wood. It's pure stone!

It was amazing to see the work area where they may spend over a year restoring just one specimen.

Being able to actually touch the fossil remains of a dinosaur was pretty incredible.

I was surprised Devon knew all about this crystal cave when asked by our tour guide. He had seen a documentary about it at some point.

Their gem and mineral collection is amazing!

Remember the movie Jurassic Park? Our guide was showing us a piece of amber (fossilized tree resin) which had bugs trapped in it, just like the movie.

They had a really cool topology demo using a special projector and sand. The kids really enjoyed playing with it. It was hard to drag them away to continue the tour!

I had no idea how some minerals glow under ultraviolet light. It was amazing to see!

I really enjoyed how much of it was hands on so the kids could feel what the different rocks and minerals are like.

Do you remember The Chelyabinsk Meteor?

Well, they have a piece of it on display!

Okay, you caught me. I was actually just taking a picture of @corinnestokes' cute butt right here. :)

They even had some radioactive minerals you could measure with a geiger counter.

The kids got some hands on experience with a jewelry maker working with the gems and mineral stones.

It was really quite beautiful.

This Tyrannosaurus Rex, of course, is the main attraction. It was found 80% complete, only missing the left leg. They were able to use molds from another find which was similar in size to reproduce it. The original fossils were taken to another location and actually put on display with some serious metal work to hold those massive fossils in place. Now that I understand how fossils are just stone copies of the original bone, I'm less concerned about which ones are the original. Stone is really heavy and hard to work with.

We learned a lot about how the molds are made. They put the fossilized rock into a cardboard box, then they pour a special rubber material around it which takes a day to set. After that, they pour in a special compound which sets in about 17 seconds (and gets really hot in the process). Once that cools, they can peel off the rubber mold to get their cast which is much lighter than the original rock but can be drilled, painted, and worked with to create complex structures like dinosaur skeletons. As you can see, they can also paint it different colors like this sandstone example.

There was even a playroom for the kids which our youngest, Monet, really enjoyed.

It was a wonderful experience, and I'm so glad I got to take some time off today and enjoy it. If you're ever heading through Murfreesboro, TN on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday from 11am to 4pm, be sure to check out the Earth Experience.

I hope you enjoyed these pictures as well. They had a sign at the entrance encouraging people to take pictures and share them on social media because it helps spread the word about their museum. Corinne found out about them through a friend's post on Facebook.

These pictures only give you a glimpse of the information here. Talking with one of the volunteers, I told them how I'll create a Steemit post to show their work. He got all excited about the idea of creating their own account and documenting their restorations. I hope they do, and we can all support them with our upvotes. What a great way to keep a non-profit doing important work to restore and educate about our world's history.

I'm using the #steemiteducation tag because I want more people to know about the great work they are doing. I've been delegating some Steem Power to the @steemiteducation account for some time now. If you want to see educational material in your Steemit feed, give them a follow.

Well, it's Friday night, and I'm ready to relax a bit. I hope you had a fantastic week!

If you think your followers would enjoy these pictures as well, please consider resteeming it to them. Thanks!

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Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, and voluntaryist who wants to help create a world we all want to live in. Visit UnderstandingBlockchainFreedom.com

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