Museums

I don't know if the rest of you just love looking around at old dead animals and artifacts. Maybe it's your favorite hobby. As for me, I go to museums to feed my ego. I feel smarter every time I take a moment to read the plaques, committing the multi-syllabic scientific terms to memory. My IQ increases every time I step inside these culturally rich arenas. While the inferior beings on the coast of California deign to surf, I glean rich, meaningless facts in darkened halls of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. For the benefit of the masses, I have included a list of some of the more interesting facts (minus the scientific terminology).

Apparently, male moose become very volatile during mating season, and they have been known to charge moving trains. A moose is also the same thing as an elk in Europe.

All mammals have the following characteristics: fur, mammary glands (in females), and three bones in the middle ear. Who knew that ears connected humans, muskrats, and kangaroos?

The duck billed platypus is one of the oldest mammals known to man.

The dodo bird is the poster child for human-caused extinction. Apparently they disappeared around 1690. The museum characterized them as "huge, flightless pigeons."

I have 28 pounds of bone weight.

Whales and camels are closely related in their DNA strands.

The African oryx is the animal closest related to the mythical unicorn. Apparently, the King James Version of the Bible translates the Hebrew word for oryx as unicorn.

I saw a prehistoric shark tooth the size of my palm. The shark that it belonged to measured over sixty feet in length.

Rubies are most plentiful in the metamorphosed rock of Mogok, Burma.

Call me shallow, but my favorite part of the museum was the Opal box in the vault. There was a beautiful white opal the size of my fist with green-gold fire trapped inside and flickering on the surface. What a fascinating rock. I couldn't stop staring at it.