Hobbies And Interests
Dinosaur Museum
For a hilarious twist into the lives of dinosaurs, Dinosaur Kingdom in Natural Bridge provides more than just exhibits with dinosaur fossils and museum replicas. Experience sites like dinosaurs with broken bones and arthritis, baby dinosaurs emerging from the egg, and casts of archeopteryx and pterodactyls with stomach stones and poop. Although a small museum, visitors can walk along side full-sized replicas of dinosaurs including a triceratops and stegosaurus.
Hostetter Natural History Museum
Located at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisburg, the D. Ralph Hostetter Natural History Museum belongs to the Science Center on campus. Open only Sunday afternoons from 2 to 5 p,m., the Discovery Room at the museum offers a plethora of artifacts, as well as aquariums and herbariums. Along with rocks, wildlife and anthropologic artifacts, visitors can explore, hands-on, the fossils of dinosaur bones.
Museum of Geosciences
The Museum of Geosciences belongs to the Department of Geosciences on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg. Visitors can peruse through exhibits of gems and minerals from Virginia and throughout the world. Fossilized dinosaur footprints found in Virginia and a full size model of an allosaurus encompass the museum's dinosaurs.
Virginia Living Museum
Upon its founding in 1987, the nascent Virginia Living Museum marked the first museum to connect elements of wildlife, science, aquarium, planetarium and botanical preserve, according to the Virginia Living Museum website. Showcasing all the state of Virginia's regions, the museum features changing dinosaur exhibits, one of which included robotic dinosaurs. Online, excerpts from the journal of a dinosaur dig present an in-depth look into the process of fossils from the earth to the museum.
Virginia Museum of Natural History
Associated with the Smithsonian Institution, the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville had its beginnings in 1984 as the Boaz Foundation. This museum hosts a variety of dinosaur fossils ranging from entire skeletons to footprints. A giant pteranodon skeleton with a wingspan of 20 feet hangs from the 40-foot ceiling of the Great Hall and the museum also houses the cast of the allosaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur. In the permanent Fossil Overlook exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Natural History, visitors can see the skull of a tyrannosaurus and displays featuring dinosaurs.