the dinosaur trip

 Saturday morning I decided to go to Dino Days. I needed to get out and do something, I remembered it being fun last year, and I could batch it with a run to Albertson's. 

It wasn't all the same things as last year, even if the tracks up to the entrance were mostly the same

 There was also the "touchable" bone, which I guess impresses me a lot, I had thought about it occasionally over the past year. But when I was a kid the museums I got to go to generally didn't have this kind of thing, and it is quite a thing to be able to touch an actual bone and realize that multiple tens of millions of years ago that was in a living creature

 They also had the picture of the "local" dinos (this would have been I think midrange dino period, or maybe late dino period; earlier on this area was all under an ocean

 It's hard to read but that one on the bottom is Pawpawsaurus, which makes me wonder if it's named for the tree (I don't even know if they occurred at the same time). It's a type of ankylosaur, which are pretty cool dinos. Apparently the type specimen is from Tarrant County. Apparently it's about 112 million years old and apparently paw paws are later (like 50 MYA). The dino is named for the Paw Paw formation of rock where its fossils were found...

The different things this year were more marine and aquatic things, including Stromatolites, which impressed me more than they would some people; they are fossils of cyanobacteria and were once considered (and still may be; I've not kept up with my paleobotany) the earliest fossils on earth, going back 3.5 billion years. I remember learning about them in Paleobotany, which I took as an elective as an undergraduate.

They also had ammonites and other shelly things. The pyritized ammonites are really pretty.

And they had reconstructions of the ammonite animals, which are similar to squids or nautiloids. They're just weird little guys:

 

There was also a neat sea urchin, showing the main body (some of the spines were right below it)

 They did have some non-local dinosaurs, mainly in picture form of the reconstructions. I took a photo of this one because I made the joke on Bluesky: "Hey, didn't these guys used to make detective tv shows?*"

 (* by which I mean the guy who was responsible for the OG Magnum, PI and Quantum Leap and also JAG and NCIS)

And they had this amusing little thing - Elvis Rex, who apparently moves around the museum from time to time and the challenge to kids is to find him

They also had their historical exhibits, so I got to look again at the old Interurban information (which I wish was an idea whose time would come back) and the stuff they had on the Woodmen's Children's Home. And they had a case of sort of "local interest items" and I saw these and suddenly remembered something I had forgotten:

 

I had a version of these, from the bank in Hudson my parents used, when I was a kid (but maybe by the time I was saving money, it was quarters?) The idea was, there were little round die-cuts in the booklet just a bit below the diameter of a dime (or a quarter, in my case) and when you got one for some reason you pressed them into the cuts and when the book got filled, you took it in to the bank and if you had a little account (I seem to remember back in those days if your parents had an account, you could get a children's account for no charge), you deposited them. Or maybe sometimes they were just used to encourage saving money, like for something you wanted? I just *barely* remember them but I do have the tactile memory of having to force the coin into the die cut (which as I said, were a smaller diameter than the coin).