delving into downtown (wellington part 4)

Location: Wellington Downtown

Baskets Left: 3

well as if these three maori baskets couldn't get any weirder on me! not only do they irradiate pure magic, but apparently they cause impossible things... like oh i don't know, firing off a completely inactive cannon!!!

at moment no one is blaming the explosion downtown on me... but knowing my luck they could change their minds anytime now... all i have to say ms. rhonwyn owes me a LOT of vacation for this little mission of hers!


at least there is still no sign of whiro or any other maori mythical creatures...

part of the reason no one is pinning the cannon discharge on me (apart from the fact that if not for the basket's magic it physically couldn't have happened!) is that i didn't stick around the scene of the "crime"... though remember people of the innerweb i didn't do anything wrong!

i had to get these baskets to some of the locations on the list. something about wellington was causing them to go haywire! they had never affected anything apart from me on the trip so far. i was hoping that meant wellington was full of mana, the maori concept of cosmic authority, which would cause the baskets to leave... however it was that they did that.

so back down the rather large ridge surrounding downtown i had to go. this took me right beside the cable car track. i figured a few more pictures of it for you people of the web wide world won't hurt.


i opted not to take the cable car for sake of keeping a low profile. that and if suddenly the police showed up i could dash off into the bush... i don't think they'd buy my story of maori magic causing the incident earlier this morning (fortunately no cops showed up...)



wandering back into town i was struck YET again by, you guessed it people of the innerweb... say it with me: "just how big wellington was compared to dunedin"... there wasn't that fun to say together ;p


i also thought it was cool how they'd built skyscrapers into the side of the giant hill. i'd never seen anything like it in a city. most cities i'd been to in fairness were not built by such big hills.


speaking of the hill, it is NOT a fun climb down let me tell you people of the innerweb! just look at all the switchback stairs i had to head down (see if you can spot me in this pic... i'm in there promise).

getting to the bottom i found a shocking surprise a crashed UFO!!! i freaked out for a second expecting the occupants to spring forth their invasion... wait a second... i'd already been here and done that! stupid brain the size of a peanut!

now that i was finally back on the "ground" level of wellington and wandering downtown i set out for my first location on the list... the new zealand parliament.


on route there was plenty of new cool art and sculptures i hadn't seen last night.

many of them were ocean or fish themed.

here was yet more evidence of wellington being prime for giant japanese monsters or kaijū. a giant mussel. typically you don't get giant mutant innocent critters unless there's an even bigger deadly mutant critter running around. if you don't believe me check out godzilla 1985 with huge sea louse, rodan with giant cockroaches, or in the case of the original godzilla king of monsters simply a normal sized harmless extinct trilobite!

some of the buildings in wellington were a little confused as to what they were. i know they call cities the urban jungle, but this building is taking it a little too seriously.

than i saw something that made me rethink my whole stance on that UFO being just a statue... a alien tripod!!!

it was an invasion and we earthlings had fallen for it!!!

ducking behind a lamp post i waited for the scenes of carnage and destruction to unfold around me, just like in the movies...

after nothing had happened for a few minutes i opened my eyes and realized the tripod hadn't moved. it was a statue too...

nasty trick wellington! is that your way of trying to fend off godzilla? aliens tend to just attract giant monsters!

i finally arrived at a lawn full of weird stone statues which was just a block from my destination. the new zealand parliament.

i don't even understand what human politics are or about (i know a thing or two about dinosaur pack politics, but craig used to tell me when i was younger despite how brutal tyrannosaur interactions are their nothing compared to humans!), but here i was at new zealand's key place of such things.

time see if i could learn a few things.

to be continued...

getting bugged at work (the centre part 3)

61.4 million BC

well today was the first day of actual work. mike assigned me to the insect corner. my job is to monitor our monsteriously enlargened insects, and make sure they don't hurt our guests.

the point of the display is to teach why humans shouldn't apply science to mad applications like growing things to unnaturally bigger sizes (well that and splicing them together... you know like paris hilt-is-on). there were a number of educational documentaries made in the 1960's, and for a while the number of giant insect attacks declined. in modern years though with the lessons of the past forgotten more and more insects are getting mutated to larger sizes!

wait a minute. aren't we contributing by growing these bugs ourselves? huh have to talk to mike about that...


i like the giant ants. their hardworking, superstrong, crafty, and all women. everything i want to have when i grow up!

these guys can be dangerous though if they get out. they'd start building super anthills, and tear down human cities to do it! worse yet sometimes one in every few thousand enlargened ants gets smart and learns to talk, and then all they do is walk around demanding the formula that did it in the first place!

okay it won't be work if everything was fun like the ants. mike decided that the display needed a bit more reinforcment. ants were dandy to grow in the 1950's but this is the new millenniumfalcon, and mad science won't settle for giant ants anymore.

so to illustrate this mike has grown giant mosquitoes. now i thought after this summer at badlands science camp that they were annouying (man there was a TON after all the rain last year. you'd turn black if you stood still for 20 seconds!). try one the size of your head! i'd rather fight dracula (and he is REALLY scary! but only one of him, and he's not as noisy at least... all i heard all day BUZZBUZZBUZZBUZZBUZZBUZZBUZZBUZZ)

the worst of all though... i suspect mike went a little frankenstien (not the monster who is also SCARY!!! but the sciency dude) and made the worst large insect of them all... the giant wasp!!!
okay so i admit the small ones scary me as much as vampires and big reanimated monsters... i've been stung on the nose a few too many times.

mike's super wasps were too much... i kinda ran away from them whenever i went to check the cage. fortuently they haven't figured out how to open doors yet... or i mean glass cases...

i'm just going to go make sure mike hide the formula well on my way home...

i'm going to need a bigger quest (museum quest part 20)

Location: New Plymouth

Baskets Left: 2

_

i FINALLY managed to get rid of one of the artifact flax baskets for ms. rhonwyn! i might actually be able to pull the quest off!!!

rather than drag my heel claws, and lose this momentum while i have it (not to mention let whiro catch up to me!) i pushed on to my next destination almost halfway up the north island!

i arrived in the town of new plymouth fairly late in the evening... which i thought was going to be a problem, and not let me hit the museum there right away...

before any of that could come into play though i rather enjoyed the cool lighting around town.

the clock tower for example turns blue in the dark!

in fact a lot of the other statues and landmarks in new plymouth have really cool lighting. this is just one example. sadly the photos i took of many others didn't turn out...

having arrived after dark, and expecting everything in town to be closed i surrendered to the possibility of camping out in front of new plymouth's puke ariki museum until morning.

that is till i noticed, a moment after i pulled up to the parking lot, some people coming out of the place. as i got out to investigate i spotted something that would endure me to this place right away (though as you'll see there was a lot inside to reinforce my liking of it). it wasn't just a museum, but it was an information centre too!

that meant that it was still open until night, and as it was just late EVENING i was going to make it in... meaning this was a record day for my quest. not only did i make a clean sweep of location intensive wellington, but also now another town altogether!

like so much else around new plymouth the museum was cooly lite at night!

little did i expect the surprise waiting inside the pretty front entrance... puke ariki isn't a huge museum, but it mimics the design of most other larger new zealand museums very well. the kiwis like to build their museums on an open lobby design where the galleries entrances and exits all converge on a central open area.

puke ariki was no different. it was just one floor was all... the upper floor mind you, with the info centre/cafe/gift shop taking up the bottom floor... so it still felt like a big place.

walking inside i was greeted by a very scary but cool model hanging from the roof in the middle of the museum's lobby...

a GIANT shark, and based on my alright know how of prehistory there was no mistaking this killer fish. it HAD to be a megalodon!

which was sweet as... or should that be shark as ;p

i'd never seen a life sized restoration of one before, and it was an awesome one too boot!

so what is megalodon exactly...

well a giant shark obviously, but their a lot more interesting than just that...

to start off with these model is probably a great representation of a megalodon, and in person gives you an idea of just how massive this fish was... the kicker being the statue was only 10 metres long. a full grown megalodon grew to be anywhere between 13 to 17 metres long!

traditionally megalodon's were viewed to be nothing more than giant great white sharks, and part of the same family. these days there's doubt about this notion, and at best palaeontologists consider they might have a common ancestor very far back. most consider megalodon to simply have evolved similar teeth to great whites, a phenomenon called convergent evolution (that is where two unrelated animals evolve similar features due to similar lifestyles).

puke ariki's megalodon restoration captured this new view of perfectly. as you'll notice people of the web wide world, this statue is more "bull dogish" or blunt in its snout than a great white. though not necessarily what the megalodon looked like (we're not sure as i'll explain in a moment) this does differentiate it from the great white.

part of the reason we can't be sure if megalodon was related or looked like the great white is because we only have partial remains of it. sharks skeletons are mostly made of cartilage, and thus wouldn't survive long enough to become fossils 99.9% of the time. as of such what we get of megalodon are teeth, and in a few instances where we're lucky a few of the neck vertebrae.

megalodons lived 18 million to 1.5 million years ago during the miocene and early pliocene eras. during this time they were pretty wide spread throughout the world, and have been found in all sorts of places. europe, north america, south america, japan, africa, india, australia, and of course new zealand. in fact despite new zealand's poor fossil record of land based critters (like dinosaurs!) they have some of the best megalodon specimens in the world!

many of these come from the otago region around dunedin (though the best known shark is actually not a megalodon, but rather a new type of true giant great white! i saw its remains at the university geology museum last year). among the best megalodons from new zealand come from just outside of new plymouth for a place called hawera. here some exceptionally well per served vertebrae were found in the tangahoe formation. also recently teeth (typically what one finds first of this big shark) have also been found there.

sadly my photos of the megalodon fossils at puke ariki didn't turn out :(

okay i won't lie people of the innerweb despite figuring out it was a megalodon instantly... i didn't actually realize it was a statue megalodon right away... not that i screamed THAT loud. only the people on the bottom floor heard me...

after calming down from the shark shock i also noticed the rather large (and life size it would turn out) replica of a bird of some kind.

getting up to the top floor one of the first displays (for which the photos turned out anyways) were the fossils of calms.

you also got to eye level with megalodon. i don't care if its a statue and not real. those big black eyes staring at me freaked me right out again! one of megalodon's teeth are almost the length of my WHOLE head...

the other statue was that of a false toothed bird called pseudodontornis. here's a little bit about it.

if you look at the mouth of pseudodontornis you'll notice what look like teeth. these are not actual teeth, but sharp ridges formed by the beak itself to mimic the function of the teeth this bird and all others lost just after the cretaceous. due to this "beaktition" (see what i did there? i replaced the teeth of dentition with beak) pseudodontornis is known as a false-toothed bird.

these birds are exceptional rare elsewhere in the world with only two individuals having been found. one from the miocene of north america and one from the eocene of england. new zealand on the other hand, has had four major pseudodontornis finds, and a quite a few partial remains found as well.

pseudodontornis has been found in new zealand as long ago as the eocene and as recent as the mid-pliocene a time frame of some 45 MILLION years! these were some pretty long lasting flyers!

they also are the largest known sea birds of all time. though the new zealand specimens measure "mere" 4.5 metre wingspans the american one's wings spanned 6 whole metres! that's the size of most pterosaurs!

with those long wings they would have effortlessly glided above the ocean's surface scooping up fish and squid as they went. just like the modern giants of sea birds albatrosses.

so as far as cool post dinosaur fossils go this area of new zealand boasted two of the biggest in the world. sharks and sea birds. i was really digging the place, and i'd only just stepped in...

just across from the extinct critter side of the natural history "hall" (it was more a space than proper gallery) was a display on non-extinct animals.

including the skeleton of... for ONCE not a hector's dolphin but rather... a beaked whale. after seeing the display case full of beaked whale skulls at te papa it was cool to see the head attached to the rest of the body... even if this was only a small beaked whale.

though i'd seen the flippers of big whales many times on my wanderings through new zealand's many museums puke ariki had the fin of a, well, fin whale put up perfectly so you could compared just how big it was compared to you...

they also had a lot of vertebrae and other left over cetacean bits from whaling on display...

like all good new zealand museums they had a moa skeleton. it was a nice one, but i guess i'm spoiled when it comes to moa skeletons due to the otago's brilliant moa "hall".

they also had a display on new zealand's national symbol the kiwi. poor guys are super endangered. sad looking at a case full of dead ones (even if they were collected over 50 years ago).

than i ONCE again (just like at te papa) bumped into the display that brought me back to the realization that my quest wasn't all fun and whales...

i turned around right into the tuatara display. though i think these reptilian survivors of the KT extinction are cool... at moment due to the mythical element of my mission their really dangerous. in maori mythology these guys are the messengers of whiro, and as of such report stuff to him that they see. meaning i now had to leave the new plymouth area quick... so that i could keep whiro off my back.

they had a cool spheriod that kinda reminded me of a time machine. wouldn't that have been cool... as it turned out my wish wasn't as far off as you might have thought.

for on the other side of the sphere was the human history side of the museum. though not a true trip back in time it was neat seeing the stuff of old as always.

well okay except for the cannon... not going to lie people of the web wide world... after that incident with the cannon in wellington i wasn't too keen on the one here...

especially considering where this cannon was pointed! if it went off, let's just say i couldn't even begin to afford it if the concept of "you break you bought" was in effect here at puke ariki!

fortunately the kete o te wananga didn't act up, and this cannon didn't fire... but i still gave it a wide birth for the rest of my visit just to be sure...

there was a lot of cool maori stuff at the new plymouth museum...

the amount of detail in this carving for example made my tiny brain hurt.

that big winged thing on the roof is a maori kite... i had no idea they could make kites. that alone ones that big! i won't learn till auckland what they were used for...

more maori clubs... and in this case also rifles they acquired from the europeans.

of most interest though was the small greenstone carving in the lower right corner...

i'd seen these before (we have 2 at the otago it turns out when i checked it when i got back), but never really paid attention to them...

the puke ariki had dozens of them on display (i only posted these 2 great photos out of 13). these were tiki... a traditional maori type jewelry i was going to find out a lot about after the museum quest.

at the time though i didn't repeat the luck of te papa, but frankly that wasn't a surprise. i hadn't lost one of the baskets till than. why should i expect them all to disappear in a row?

due to my tuatara encounter here though i had to leave, and try to put some distance between me and new plymouth...

to be continued...

natural history gallery (melbourne museum part 2)

i was so far very impressed with the melbourne museum, and i'd only seen the lobby!

as ms. rhonwyn had told me to enjoy the rest of the museum while she set up a surprise for me... i have no idea what it is. i can't wait (well okay i CAN wait, but i don't want to!)... i was going to do just that, and check out the rest of the museum.

now as i was no longer carrying any magic artifacts (like on my just finished museum quest) i could just wander around and enjoy the place.

after all i do really enjoy museums. as funny as it may sound they have a very homely feeling to me, and i feel very comfortable in them... it isn't funny though really. if you were laughing stop. you're being more silly than me right now! i grew up in a museum after all...


the melbourne museum just kept delivering after that amazing lobby... first thing you hit after the admission desk was a full mounted "pygmy" blue whale skeleton. it was just like the one at te papa only it was mounted at guest level rather than hanging from the ceiling.


these cool fish... uh thingies... decorated the windows of the museum further away from the lobby.

than came a preview display for the dinosaur hall. which got me both excited to see it, and also reminded me of ms. rhonwyn's surprise which she was giving me in the dinosaur hall...


rather than dwell on what ms. rhonwyn was mustering up for me i kept up checking out the museum. which was pretty big, and was thus going to take me a while.

outside the human related galleries was this nifty mini fort building effort. though i have to say the mini people were not being very industrious. ants make up for their small size by colossal effort. these mini people seemed to be letting their low lot in life depress them into inaction...

sadly no photos were allowed in the human galleries of the museum so this is the only one i can show you.

which is okay because my favourite parts of museums tend to be the natural history galleries!


the display outside these halls had me panic for a second.


there were some baby triceratops. awwww oh so cute... baby steaks... mmmmm steak... what people of the innerweb? i can't think my future dinner is cute?!?!?


anyways i panicked as for a moment i worried that i'd accidentally stumbled into the dinosaur hall.


it just turned out to be another preview and also a kid museum attraction. with a few warm up, but small dinosaur display items kids tend to get really psyched by the rest of the museum. this velociraptor skull being a perfect item for the task...


it also turned out to be the museum's dinosaur nursery. the melbourne museum was only now just building up a internal supply of living dinosaurs now to entertain guests in addition to their fossil displays. the nursery was now being used on the just recently acquired triceratops eggs, but had first been used on this locally found minmi when she first hatched a couple years ago.

i guess you could say she was cute people of the web wide world, but i say ankylosaurs are only good for trouble!... nothing ever came from an ankylosaurs other than lost teeth and jaw pain!!!


admittedly i spent a bit of time checking out these little guys. they were the first flesh and blood dinosaur i'd been in any sort of contact with since my cousin larry's visit. as they were only babies they were both agreeable, and more cute than my cousin.
_
in the main natural history corridor was a very weird half to something i'd already seen at te papa. the race horse phar lap. here in the case before me was the skin/hide of this famous horse. te papa has his bones (i didn't post my picture of them, but i will at some point). kinda creepy that they'd split him up like that if you ask me...


than came the australia animals display. as you probably know people of the web wide world australia has a lot of unique and special animals "trapped" on its shores. well this was a great display to get to know a lot of them.


there was of course a whole variety of the ever famous aussie marsupial kangaroo. like this GIANT red kangaroo.


reminding us that australia (like new zealand) has suffered biologically due to human actions was a stuffed now extinct tasmanian tiger or thylacine.


an aussie ratite the emu.


my fav was the giant saltwater crocodile.


the dome crested cassowary is also sure to please.


they seem to have gotten one of their labels on the sign wrong. they said this thing was a tasmanian devil, but yet it didn't spin or stand on two legs.


the frilled lizard that inspired the terrible dilophosaur (but frilled lizards aren't terrible mind you) was from here too.


the cold blooded cases were neato too. australia has tons and tons of reptiles for example (unlike new zealand).


things like monitor lizards, or as they call them here goanna lizards. i'll have to post on these mosasaur relatives later.


speaking of mosasaur relatives, australia is the world's capital for poisonous snakes. check all of them out.


they also have a lot of big cool squids as you can see.


a king crab rules over the ocean cabinet.


the jumbo gar in the middle of the ocean case was a slight reminder of home (as in the tyrrell). though our gars at the tyrrell were like 1/5 the size.

next was the earth science section. there was a giant geode... though not as massive as the geode from the movie the core, but than again i don't think you'd get one 100's of kms long and in the molten centre of the earth!

i really liked their black light rock identifier room.


in their insect hall i came face to face with, and than promptly retreated from a GIANT bug... someone has to stop my old boss at the vancouver eco-centre from spreading his monstrously large bugs around the world... i wonder if i was working for a real super villain back than, and saw the beginnings of his bid for world domination?


seriously this isn't the first time i've run into them since i'd left canada. there were also some in new zealand!

i hid behind this case, and for a long time i thought there was nothing in it but some plants. that is till i realized that some of the twigs were moving... they were walking sticks. no people of the innerweb, not actual sticks that walked. insects that use camouflage to look like their sticks!

marking the beginning of the marine gallery was a wall of crabs.

inside a sampling of various australian marine predators. the one that caught my eye for the photo was that of the skull of an orca or killer whale.

next i ran into something that just made me laugh. a great white shark, but sadly not anywhere near as awesome as the front lobby one. no this one was neither properly shaped (not that it was terribly shaped) nor life size (unlike the amazing lobby one).

it was the exact same model i'd been seeing pop up everywhere since wellington. one here, another here, and the last one here (oh and NOW here ;p ). i totally had to get in on making great whites cause there was definitely a market for them here down under!

the shark jaw display was outstanding though. can you believe this is just a SAMPLING of australia's sharks. there's several key species missing from this wall!?!?!

in the last room you walk into the middle of one of nature's most epic battles... well okay at least a recreation through artifacts of said battle.

on one side was the skull of the sperm whale... which had i not already seen the real living animal or the full skeleton at te papa would have been way cool. now it was just cool... and on the other side (making up for the lack of gusto i had for a mere skull of sperm whale... and don't get me wrong i LOVE sperm whales!)

a preserved giant squid!!!

in the middle of the whole museum complex was an indoor forest, that put the cretaceous garden at the tyrrell to shame. one i had the feeling i was going to see a lot more of soon...

underneath the main corridors monitor lizard statue fun stuff was materializing...

ms. rhonwyn had prepared her surprise for me, and was waiting for me to arrive.

man oh man i had no idea what i was walking into...

next the surprise...