Photo tour of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Dinosaurs, Egyptian mummies, and the Hope Diamond.
African elephant in the Rotunda.
That's me in the Rotunda.
The Dinosaur Hall.
Reconstructed Eurypterids, known as "sea scorpions".
350 million year old fossilized tree trunk.
Fossil ferns from Pennsylvania.
Petrified wood from the Triassic period, 215 million years old.
Fossil stingray from Wyoming, about 30 million years old.
Fossil maple leaf from Colorado, 50 million years old.
An early horse, Orohippus. About the size of a dog, it lived in Wyoming about 50 million years ago.
Diatryma, a five-foot-tall "terror bird" that lived in North America 50 million years ago.
An ancient beaver species, Paleocastor, fossilized inside its own burrow.
Dire Wolf skull from California. About 9,000 years old.
Sabre-Tooth Cat skull.
Smithsonian workers extracting fossils from their rocks and preparing them for display.
Tylosaurus, a giant marine lizard from the time of the dinosaurs. It is closely related to modern monitor lizards, and distantly related to modern snakes.
Giant sea turtle from the Cretaceous period.
Drotops, a spiny trilobite from Morocco.
A reconstruction of sea life in the Silurian Period, about 420 million years ago.
T rex.
Triceratops.
Allosaurus skull.
Diplodocus.
Hall of Sea Life
Mounted Right Whale.
Giant Squid.
Jaws of extinct shark Megalodon.
Killer Whale skull.
Hall of Mammals. Taxidermy mounts.
Osteology. Mounted skeletons.
Swordfish skeleton.
Anteater skeleton.
Bat skeleton.
Giraffe skeleton, has the same number of bones in its neck as you do. Seven.
Cutaway turtle skeleton.
The David H Koch Hall of Human Origins. Yes, THAT "David H Koch".
Fossil hominid skulls.
Lion-headed man, carved from mammoth ivory. 35,000 years old.
Yes, humans share about 60% of our genes with a banana.
Egyptian artifacts.
Egyptian mummy.
Mummified cats, held to be sacred by Egyptians.
A Moai staue from Easter Island.
Audience members holding a hissing cockroach during an educational talk at the Insect Zoo.
Indian Ornamental Tarantula.
A large centipede from Arizona.
Minerals and rock samples in the Geology exhibit.
Gold and silver.
The supposedly "cursed" Hope Diamond.
Earth model showing tectonic plates.
Iron meteorites.
ALH-84001. A Martian meteorite found in Antarctica, it was announced to contain fossils of Martian bacteria. Most scientists today have now rejected that claim.
A sample of moon rock brought back by the Apollo missions.
A sample from the oldest known formation of Earth rock, from Canada. 3.96 billion years old.