Happy New Year

I didn't do much for New Year's Eve, but slept in anyway. On New Year's Day I wandered down to the Manitoba Museum (the quite uninteresting name for the former alliterative Museum of Man and Nature). Along with several thousand small children, I checked out the Ice Age Mammals temporary exhibit. It was created by the Museum of Civilisation and a couple of other museums. It runs until April.

There is a complete mastodon skeleton (or a replica?), and a lot of skulls of mostly extinct animals. There was a small display of a dig that's being done on Ellesmere Island. They've found a 4 million year old marsh with the remains of beavers, obviously a sign of a much warmer climate. They also have a new display in the museum itself, of first nations' farming near Boissevain, especially interesting for me since my visit to the Moncur Gallery in July 2006 (Moncur is a great museum, pretty small, but a remarkable collection. It's in the basement of the Boissevain library. They have a lot of material relating to the early human history of Manitoba). I spent an hour in the temporary exhibit, and another hour and a half in the museum. Time well spent.

When I went to Rome last month, I didn't make it to Pompeii. So I'm hoping to make it to Minneapolis before Sunday to catch the Pompeii exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. It closes then and moves on to another American museum.