John's Birthday

Last week was my birthday and Laura had a day full of surprises planned after language class. She was able to find a mexican restaurant in München and invited our friends from class. From left to right are Shawn, Laura, John, Mohamed, Benjamin, Nathaniel, Walter, and Marianne.

The first birthday surprise happened before dinner. Laura took me to the Palaeontologisches Museum München at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universitӓt. When I woke up that morning, I did not expect to see the great fossils waiting just a few kilometers away.

An ancient European relative of today's elephants. This bull had four tusks; two up top and two in the bottom.



Here I am with the remains of a 12,000 year old extinct deer species, the so-called "Irish Elk". This fellow stood 1.7 meters at the shoulder and weighed 600 kg. It shed and re-grew that rack each year. (He's a few feet behind me, so he is even bigger than he looks).


And for the pièce de résistance, the Munich specimen of Archaeopteryx (though it may be a replica of the real thing...I'm not sure). This is one of only several specimens in the world of one of the most important fossil finds (in my humble opinion, at least). Archaeopteryx shows traits transitional between birds and dinosaurs and lived during the Jurassic Period. The first full body fossil was described in 1861 just two years after Darwin published on the Origin of Species. This fellow was big news. The Munich specimen was first described in the early 1990s. Hopefully we will get to see the more famous textbook specimen from 1861 in Berlin as well.