We toured the Rochester Museum and Science Center last week. Apart from taking part in a Kwanzaa celebration there, we hadn’t visited in maybe twenty years. For a long time now, it’s been on our list of “places to get back to.”

As the name suggests, RMSC covers both science and the history of the Rochester area. But the science presentations are actually slanted toward the area, so each emphasis supports the other.

Just for instance, in the “Exhibition Earth” area a cast-bone mastodon skeleton faces a full-sized mastodon diorama. These large relatives of the elephant rumbled around our area something like 10,000 years ago. The presentation focuses on what “Rochester” was like at that time – how the climate, wildlife, vegetation, and human inhabitants differed from what we’d find today.

There’s also exhibitry showing significant mastodon finds locally, tying the whole thing together very nicely – AND an “archeology” pit where kids can dig for “fossils.” You can also wend your way through a “glacier,” suggesting those that covered our region during the last ice age.

If your museum hopes to be a really cool place, it needs a dinosaur skeleton. Apparently only one dinosaur type has been verified in New York state, thanks to tracks found down around Nyack – there’s been too much erosion of the appropriate strata to preserve many fossils. But by looking at the dinosaurs found in New England and Pennsylvania we can draw sensible conclusions, so when you visit look for the skeleton of probable resident Albertosaurus – small for a member of the tyrannosaur clan, but big enough to scare the dickens out of us.

In some ways even more exciting is a hall of life-size dioramas showing the flora and fauna of various habitats in our area today… in each case, the diorama is set at a particular location in the region, elevating it from the academic to the experiential. There’s also a set of small dioramas showing habitat and wildlife change over thousands of years, leading from the last ice age.

Another gallery focuses on weather and hydrology, including a slanted sand table where you (or your kids) can get hands dirty. Water flows continuously down, and you can restructure the lay of the land to see what changes it makes in the flow and direction of the water.

I loved maneuvering the underwater ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) with its television camera, and watching the screen as I went along. There’s also a large canal-and-lock layout that you (or your kids) can operate, with information tying in the Erie Canal’s significance for our area.

Up on the second floor is a good-sized gallery on Underground Railroad days in Rochester, focusing on several key escaped slaves, including Frederick Douglass. This held a special interest for us since one of the focus people is Austin Steward, who walked away from slavery in Bath and escaped first to Ontario County and then to Rochester. There he became a comrade of John Brown and Frederick Douglass, a key figure in the anti-slavery movement and the Underground Railroad, and a businessman of considerable wealth.

There’s also a gallery on Native American life, organized around such large geo-cultural groupings as Pacific Northwest, Southeastern Desert, Northeastern Woodlands, and so forth. I was about to step into a room dedicated to Seneca life when the P.A. system announced a third-floor presentation about Tesla coils on the third floor, so off we went, and were having a fine time indeed (who’s cooler than Tesla?) until the fire alarm went off.

The museum was evacuated safety and quickly, and actually it was a nice enough day that we could have just relaxed beneath the wide-spreading shade trees and considered it a fine afternoon… not to mention the fun of watching all the fire trucks. Word went around that they’d been working on the alarm system, and it had probably gone off by accident. Figuring that it would take a bit of time to properly check everything before reopening the museum, we decided to call it a day. Which means, of course, that we owe ourselves another trip to see the other half of the place. Which we don’t mind a bit.

One more thing I must mention. In Rochester Museum I had an experience I will probably never have anywhere else… encountering a flock of passenger pigeons. These many mounted birds suggest the time, almost within memory, when they covered our landscape in thousands… before we killed them off, in the joint names of sport and business… wiping out species far more quickly than the ice age did.