Tyrant Lizard

During my travels last week, I went to the Field Museum in Chicago, where I met Sue.

This is Sue:

Sue is famous for two reasons.

1.) She is the largest, most intact tyrannosaur skeleton ever found.

2.) She was reanimated by the heroic wizard Harry Dresden few years back, who then rode her into battle against a coven of six necromancers attempting to become a god, as shown in the following scientific illustration:

This means that in 2010, I saw both the largest intact tyrannosaur skeleton AND the largest intact triceratops skeleton, which is located at the Minnesota Science Museum in St. Paul:

But the tyrannosaur and the triceratops are natural enemies; hopefully the pictures I took will not start dueling across my hard drive. Hard drives are expensive.

The Field Museum in Chicago is one of my favorites because it has two of my favorite topics: dinosaurs, and Ancient Egypt:

This carving comes from the reconstructed tomb of Unis-Ankh, a Fifth Dynasty princeling of little historical significance. But while he might have been of no significance, consider that the carvings from his tomb have lasted for forty-three hundred years. In other words, those carvings are about eighteen times older than the United States, four times older than the British crown, three times older than Islam, twice as old as Christianity, and several centuries older than Judaism (since Abraham probably did not live until several centuries after the Egyptian Old Kingdom ended).

And I can’t even find a laptop computer that will last for more than five years. Clearly, the ancient Egyptians could teach us a thing or two about extended warranties.

-JM