We had a pretty fabulous day at the museum today! So fabulous that I’m going to break it up into pieces because I love the pics so much!

First off, I think Body Worlds was really amazing. It was a startling exhibit that I enjoyed but also found disturbing. I was doing really well until there was a man sliced like a loaf of bread. And he had a face that had skin on it! Very unsettling. At any rate, I think if you’re curious about the human body at all it’s very well worth seeing. Bonus is that the entire thing was created by a totally mad scientist named Gunther who wears a black hat at all times. Very odd.

The museum is a great day-long activity! What a huge place filled with scads of interesting exhibits! One of my favorites is surely the chicken hatchery. Dale took these great shots to show off the exhibit:

There are two pens in the hatchery. The first is where the eggs go when they are 21 days old. This is when the baby chicks finally break on through the shell with their special egg-shell breaking beak! The exhibit helpfully puts one of the eggs under a magnifying glass, as you can see above.

Click on the pic above to get a closer look at a tiny beak poking away at its shell! So bitsy!

There were three new chicks milling about during our visit. It takes the little guys about 10 hours to bust out of the shell so they are tired when they get out. They kind of just hop around lamely squeaking like crazy.

They are very curious right from the start and they poke around, looking for food or momma or something and then they get tired and rest for a bit. Once the chicks have made it through the shell and have chilled out in the cage for a few hours they can graduate to the next phase…

Baby chicks can start to eat grain about 24 hours after they are born. So they are moved to the incubation housing next door where they eat and frolic with the other new chicks until they are moved to a farm or something. The museum hatches birds that were facing extinction and helps boosts the population of three different birdies.

How insanely cute is this little guy? Why does he have to grow up to be an ugly chicken? I swear, I’m eventually going to be vegetarian because animals are just too cute to eat!