Compared Anatomy

So here I am again, as promised, in a quick posting. This week has been school holidays and, to start off in style, on Monday we went to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and to the "Gallery of Compared Anatomy and Palaeontology". A real mouthful and a real eyeful too. A great hall full of skeletons and brains in jars and dissected siamese-lambs and other such anatomical wonders. The kids loved it! And they were so busy noticing and trying to recognise different skeletons that they didn't notice the stuff in jars! Whew! So... how can a not-yet-but-soon-two year old see a skeleton of a water-buffalo and say "cow" and then see the next skeleton along of a camel and say "horse"? I don't know how he understood what he was looking at but he did and it blew my mind. Of course the part he loved the most was the dinosaur room. I live with a dinosaur right now! And D was so excited about seeing real whale skeletons and learning about how they filtered out tiny things to eat in their enormous mouths. My thoughts are more along the lines of how hippos' skeletons don't look like hippos, and how a tortoise's skeleton is fused to its shell, an integral part of it - I always thought of it as being separate, and how nice a shape a whale jawbone is and how strangely Christ-like a certain gibbon looked and and and. I know we'll be back for more!

Oh and just because... below are two hedgehog skeletons.
I like to think of this next one as a flamingo skeleton. But I must confess I didn't read it's label.
Lundi, nous sommes allés à la Galérie d'Anatomie Comparée et de Paléontologie au Jardin des Plantes. Quelle merveille. Et Penser que je ne savais même pas que cela existait! Tant de squelettes et de choses bizarres et dérangeantes en bocal! Les enfants ont adoré et même mon petit garçon de presque deux ans a compris qu'il s'agissait d'animaux et il a su en reconnaître quelques uns. C'était l'occasion pour nous tous d'apprendre et de découvrir de nouvelles choses. On y retournera, c'est sûr!

En haut la grande salle d'anatomie comparée, au milieu deux hérissons, en bas, je pense, un flamant rose.