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A Day With the Dinosaurs, at Rochester Museum and Science Center

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How far would YOU go to see robotic dinosaurs?
We had to go from Bath to Geneseo for an appointment last week, so we just kept on goin’ afterward, up to Rochester Museum and Science Center.
I love dinosaurs, and I was just about to write that I think MOST kids do, when I remembered that I’m 70 years old, and arguably not a kid any longer.
Except when it comes to dinosaurs. I think we’re all kids with dinosaurs.
I got a glimpse of this right in the lobby, where you meet your first dino, AND you can control it by using a panel of buttons. Raise and lower neck; swing neck side to side; turn head; open mouth; swing tail; roar. It was loads of fun, and by working several buttons simultaneously I could make it raise its neck, open its mouth, and roar all at once. A little girl, probably not quite two, was enthralled, showing no signs of fear at all. Dinosaurs are scary, but not frightening. (Even if we’ve seen Jurassic Park.)
The main exhibit is on the third floor, and we had scarcely gotten off the elevator when my wife laughed, and called my attention to the first informational panel. There was my childhood hero, Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews – the man who discovered the first dinosaur eggs, and many previously-unknown species, on the Central Asiatic Expeditions for the American Museum of Natural History. With his high boots, broad-brimmed hat, high-powered rifle, gun belt with pistol and cartridges, and expeditions to exotic and dangerous places, he was obviously an inspiration for Indiana Jones.
This third-floor space had multiple dinos, interspersed with artifacts, photos, diagrams, films, and explanatory panels – not only on dinosaurs and their lives, but also on the finding and interpretation of the beasts. You can operate the spike-tailed stegosaurus and the horned triceratops. But the albertosaurus – a smaller (only three or four tons) cousin of tyrannosaurus rex – operates on its own, either set to a timer or activated by motion sensors when someone approaches. The velociraptors, on the other hand, operate and squawk constantly. They could get on your nerves.
(There’s some artistic liberty – nobody knows how dinosaurs actually sounded, or what colors they were.)
The dinosaurs are great, but RMSC also dedicates much of its space to the story of Rochester and its people. There’s a huge diorama of the city as it was two centuries ago, and a mocked-up country store with historic post office boxes – from Ingleside, in the Town of Prattsburgh!
We walked our way through extensive exhibits on Native American life in the Rochester area, and in the United States at large. I made a stop, as I always do when we visit, at a large panel dedicated to Austin Stewart, who walked away from slavery in Bath when he was 22 years old, got legal help to assert his freedom, learned to read, and became an entrepreneur in Rochester. He was honored in the first class of inductees to the Rochester Business Hall of Fame.)
Austin Steward was also an activist fighting for abolition, a comrade of John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Local people asked him to give an address celebrating the end of New York slavery in 1827, and he lived long enough to see it ended throughout America. The exhibit incudes a late-life picture, from the frontispiece of his memoir… perhaps the only picture we have of a person who had been enslaved in Steuben County.
There are also hands-on science and technology exhibits, but our schedule precluded them on this particular day. The dino show goes through May 1. RMSC goes back to 1912, and it has over a million artifacts. You might like it. We sure do.

We Finally Get Back to Rochester Museum and Science Center

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.