It is this huge park with a lof of different buildings and different museums.
First we went into the Grand Gallery of Evolution where the dinosaur special exhibit was. It was pretty cool. They had this huge dinosaur in the center of the room - one side was normal skin and such, the other side showed the muscles and stuff that would have been in the dinosaur. On the right of the above picture you can see the glowing lungs that were huge! It was showing how big they would be, and they had like the heart and other organs so you could see the size of everything that would have been inside it. It was pretty amazing as I've seen the bones before, but never really thought about how big all of their insides would be. They had how big a baby in the egg would be, and some eggs and all kind of fun things.
A dinosaur femur. After we walked through the special dinosaur exhibit we went up and checked out the gallery of evolution.
It was this huge building with tons of information. This is from the 3rd of 5 floors looking down on the 2nd floor. It took forever to get around to looking at everything.
Some of the animal displays. Besides these they also had a lot of...odd things. Such as:
This was just on display in the aquatic animals floor - I have no idea what it is...There was not a description for it it was just there.
Or how about a lovely square full of balloons? That makes sense...
Or this tiger climbing the basket on the back of the elephant...
Though they did have some ferocious guard animals. This one almost got me! Really there was this couple standing behind Raymond as he took forever to take the photo and they thought I was pretty funny so I was trying not to laugh at them laughing at me and I didn't do that good of a job. I blame Raymond for taking forever.
They also had this room on dodo birds and this odd window shade with Alice and the bird bones..you could only see it at the right angle. All in all I really enjoyed it. Learned about some animals I had never heard of and it was fun. While waiting in line for tickets I saw there was a paleontology museum as well and it looked like it might be interesting so I wanted to check it out.
In the gardens between the two buildings there were lot of sculptures (they were at opposite ends of the park).
The first thing you see upon entering is this sculpture of a ape or something choking a lady. It was odd.
Then you enter the museum and it is...packed full of animal bones! This is the first floor from the doorway and it was....a little crazy! It is this large building, but it is like they had enough to fill 3 buildings, but wanted to display everything so they tried to jam it all into the one. It was three floors so we decided to start with the top floor and work our way down (which coincidentally is the order in which we liked them - the top floor was the coolest, the second floor was our next favorite, and the bottom floor least favorite though I still enjoyed it quite a bit). It was interesting as everyone else started on the first floor and worked their way up and by the time they got to the top floor they just ran through and hardly looked at anything. I was like what is wrong with you people? This is the coolest!! The top floor was all fossils and cools thing - I could have spent way more time looking at all the amazing things they had. I have 8 billion photos from the top floor so I will just post a few of my favorites (if I can just pick a few) and if you want more you can check out the album.
It was just amazing. Here is a photo from the 3rd floor looking down on the second floor. All along the outside of the 3rd floor were display cases full of fun things. SO after we looked at all of that we went down and looked at the dinosaurs and stuff on the 2nd floor.
I bet you would never know that I loved this museum! It was so much fun. Finally after the top two floors we looked at the animal bones on the first floor.
Really we did a lot of cool things in Paris, but this is in my top two. I loved it so much and I will definitely go back if I am in the city again. They just had so many amazing things! They also had this huge building that was rock and minerals, which I am not sure if it was open to the public or not (by the time we were done at the paleontology museum everything was closed), but if so I would love to stop by there as well as I am sure it is an amazing collection. It was so great and I highly recommend it if you like that kind of thing.
It was raining when we got out so we walked towards where we were going to have dinner and got some tea along the river where we could see the eiffel tower to wait for the amazing light show that would tell us it was time for dinner.
With the light show. It is just a bit ridiculous. We had dinner then hobbled back to the hotel. Along the walk to the natural history museum we went by the Pantheon and Raymond decided he would like to check it out. It is included in the museum pass so we figured out that it would be cheaper and we could do other things that were not on our list if we got a 2 day museum pass. So the following day we were up and at the Pantheon when it opened at 10 to get the pass and start seeing everything we could. I think i will sign off here and leave the crazy full day of museums and fun for next time.
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