Morrison Museum of Natural History

A Museum You Should Visit

The Morrison Museum of Natural History makes a good pair with a visit to Denver area Dinosaur Ridge.

It’s a small museum, you can easily see everything in it, and pepper the guides with questions, in 2 hours.

They take you on guided tours of the building, the guides are extremely knowledgeable. Roughly, they take you from late Triassic to ice age fossils. They let you carefully touch the fossil casts they have, which are imaginatively mounted.

There’s a Utahraptor mounted as if it were preening it’s arm feathers, a mosasaur skull with wide open jaws, and Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus skulls on pivots. The guides rotate them so you can see things like the giant ball of the ball-and-socket joint that held up the Triceratops’ skull.

Sometimes, Bob Bakker is around. The docents will refer you to “Bob in the front office” if you ask enough difficult questions that demonstrate background knowledge. My kids and I got to talk to Bakker because they wanted to know why all the reconstructions of mammoths were shown with humps. Bakker’s answer: because eye-witness drawings have them that way.