Lucy

Marie found online that the bones of "Lucy" one of the oldest hominids ever found. We changed our plans for the weekend and drove to Seattle. On the drive, I registered my car and retitled it in Oregon. I officially own my own car. It also has Crater Lake plates!

We stopped in Kelso, Washington and ate dinner with Marie's childhood friend Lee. We ate deep fat fried onions, mushrooms and I had fish and chips. Great roadtrip food....

We also called the people we were staying with on the road to see if it was okay. Luckily Melody and Ira are gracious and said of course. We got in late Friday night and hit the hay.

On Saturday we woke up mid morning had breakfast at the house and drove to the Pacific Science Center. I had been there when I was in 2nd grade and one of the only things I remember is that they had lights on a wall that moved as fast as the fastest sprinter at the time. We would push the button and try and out run it. It wasn't there anymore. We walked into the DINOSAUR exhibit.

I am a little bit of a geek with dinos. We then walked through a great Earth and space center followed by a great amount of genetics information. It was impressive how much they had on genetics. Marie was also thrilled that there were Naked Mole Rats. Her favorite part of the Portland zoo is the rats and there was a whole section dedicated to them.

We then wandered through the bugs and insects section. Melody, our host, is a master's student studying spider DNA. She likes the creepy crawlies. We got to go to a tropical butterfly house too.

Then it was time for us to enter the Lucy exhibit. We walked into the maze of people and Ethiopian artifacts. The exhibit had much of the history of Ethiopia and it's culture. I learned much more about King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. I read a little about Ras Tafari this summer before our trip to Jamaica so I had a little (very little) Ethiopian history in my head.

There were pictures and descriptions about the history of the confluence of Islam, Judiasm and Christianity. There was also a place that described Ethiopian food. Marie loved the place to smell the spices.

They then had a place where you transition into Paleoarcheology and how they find fossils. I liked this part. It discussed index and trace fossils as well as absolute and radiometric dating. YEAH! They then had a ramp set up with casts of fossils of all the hominid skulls ever found, or at least the most complete skulls. It started with ancestors who were more like chimps than humans, and moved up through Lucy's species into homo erectus, homo neanderthals, and homo sapians. Then you enter a small room and the bones were there. It was incredible, awe inspiring and silent. I sat looking at the 3.18 million year bones for about 3 minutes in silence. They also had replicas of the bones set as if they were in a complete skeleton, they had a representation of what Lucy would have looked like and a mural moving through all the hominids into homo sapiens. I wish my students could have been there. It was a very good way of explaning evolution, and human evolution which as we all know is a touchy subject. I have students this year trying to complain about it during a physical science class. There were no cameras allowed sadly.

Marie and I drove home that night after we stopped for some Ethiopian food. Marie also picked up an Ethiopian cook book.
Today we graded papers, ran, cleaned the house, and got ready for our week. Just two more weeks until Spring Break!