The Kelvingrove Museum (and my 300th post !)

This is my 300th post since I started blogging in July 2009 ! I did a big post when I reached 100, but I haven't really bothered with any milestones since then (I almost forgot about this one too !). It is also a good time to write about the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow because it is the museum I have visited the most, and each time I plan to write a blog post but never get round to it.

It is one of my favourite museums in Scotland, and I've visited a few, like the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the McManus and the D'Arcy Thomson Museum in Dundee, Perth Art Gallery and Museum, the Huntarian, the Stirling Smith Museum and the Bell Pettigrew Museum. So here's my write up of it !

The Bell Pettigrew Museum in St Andrews

During half-term two weeks ago me and dad went out to St Andrews to see the Bell Pettigrew Museum which is part of the university there. It is one of the best museums I have been to. I had to email in advance to ask for permission to go but there wasn't a problem and the museum was open anyway. 

It was a bit tricky to find and all the rooms round it were getting painted and had workmen in, but when we were there we spent a couple of hours there and we could have spent longer.

The archeological bones, part 1: the puzzles

This is a story that is too big to say in one blog post so I'm going to spread it over three weeks. It all began when I got an email from a bone collector called Jen who lives in Dundee not far from me. She said that she was moving to Africa and she had some old archeological bones and asked if I wanted them because none of the universities did. I said yes, definitely, and about two weeks ago she came round to my house to drop them off before she moved and meet me and see my bone collection.

(This is one of two big sets of bones I was given this summer. The other came from Ric and I am still working through them but I am going to write about them too.)

I have never had archeological bones before and I asked some questions about the bones but probably not enough. She said some of the bones were 1,000 years old. She brought them in a big box and inside the big box there were sandwich bags of different groups of bones.

The pony skull I bought for £1

I was hoping to write about the Times magazine feature on kid bloggers today, but it isn't in the magazine today so it must be in  next week. So instead I'm writing about this which is the pony skull I bought about a month ago on eBay.

I don't buy a lot of skulls on eBay but this one was special and a real bargain. Only one other person was bidding on it. I was prepared to pay £10 but I only had to pay £1.04 and about £5 postage.

The ancient horse jaw

Near the end of last year I went on a walk up to The Pheasant Woods which are on the other side of the river to the village. The Pheasant Woods are a collection of six or seven small woods and four lakes which used to be part of a big country estate. The country house was knocked down years ago but the ice houses and some other buildings are still there. It's a great place to find bones and watch roe deer and buzzards but I've explored it so much I don't often go there any more.

This time I went up in the afternoon and I was walking around and then I found this on the ground. It was very well camouflaged that I thought it was a big bit of tree bark. When I picked it up I realised it was a big jaw and I thought it was off a cow. I spent about two hours searching for the rest of the skull and skeleton but never found them.

Half term trips: The National Museum of Scotland

Last week me mum, dad, Harry and Sam all went to the new National Museum of Scotland which is in Edinburgh. It isn't really a new museum but they closed it for years to move things about. It reopened about two months ago and now it's even better.

The picture above is of the big natural history gallery. They have moved all the animals around and mixed them all up. Here are some of the things that I saw when I visited.

The best bone museum in the world ?

This week I've been in Paris with my mum, dad and baby brother Sam. While I was there there was a museum I  had heard about and really wanted to see. It is called the Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée and it is part of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (National Museum of Natural History).