Possums, Toads and Large Rodents

Sometimes grand children are an excuse to do fun things even when they are not actually in tow.  The other day we found ourselves in the Twin Cities and decided to visit the Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota.  Just to check it out you know, to see if it would be fun to take the Small Ones some day.

We both remembered it from long ago when it was a quaint little museum full of dusty taxidermy dioramas.  Now it's big and modern.  And while a lot of the dioramas made the trip the place is spic and span.  I have never seen glass polished to the extent that sometimes I had to peer closely to see that it was there at all.  They must have the greatest janitorial staff in existence.

It encouraged me to snap a few pictures with the "Through Glass" function on my camera.  Some of them turned out pretty well.

Wrestling possums.  I figure this will be the grandkids in a few years when the age/size discrepancy is less.

Some of the things on display were live including this meditative toad.

Over in the prehistory section I posed warily next to a Rodent of Unusual Size.  

Technically it is a giant beaver of some sort.  Here's his modern day descendant apparently nursing a stomach ache.  Must have eaten some bad bark.

And because the primary function of the internet is cat pictures, here's a lynx licking its lips in anticipation of chomping onto a little bird.  Both the bird and the lynx are of course full of dry stuffing material so this amount of gustatory anticipation is actually a bit odd.

A fun place to visit.  We will haul the grandkids over some day.