It's been a while, but well worth waiting for, I hope. Our latest installment!
Inhabitants of Leiden have all the luck in the world: their city is as beautiful as Amsterdam with all these Golden Age canals, yet Leiden is much less overrun by tourists. And if you are a museum lover, you can indulge in an array of world-famous musea. One of them is ‘Naturalis’, a museum on natural history. To the modern ear, this qualification doesn’t sound woke enough, and that’s why the museum is now called ‘Biodiversity Center’. A few years ago, Naturalis moved into a beautiful new building with an imposing entrance hall, it allmost looks like a cathedral.
Today, we visited the Triceratops herd in the dinosaur department of the museum. Triceratopses were giant herbivore dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period, some 65 million years ago. The Naturalis team discovered the herd (of five) in Wyoming, USA and were allowed to bring them to the Netherlands, where they were painstakingly reassembled, and then proudly put on show.
There were some bones missing, but nothing a 3d-printer couldn’t solve. The museum also houses a giant T-Rex called Trix. She is separated from the triceratopses by a wall, because she’s a carnivore with teeth that barely fit in your trouser pocket.
