Jurassic Museum of Asturias (MUJA): updated 21/7, image heavy

[ceratopsian]

In May this year, I went on a geology trip to northern Spain with a group of people from the History of Geology (HOGS) and the UK Dinosaur Society.  In addition to pure geology, we also visited two dinosaur museums and various dinosaur footprint sites.  The first museum I'll show you is MUJA, built on the "Dinosaur Coast" of Asturias, Spain - which isn't so different from the Jurassic Coast of England.  I took quite a few photos, so I'll upload a few at a time.  Today's offering is devoted to the exterior of the museum.

The museum itself was designed to resemble a tridactyl dinosaur footprint - inside it's organised as three great halls.  The area is famous for its footprint sites, hence the architectural choice.



The museum attracts large numbers of excited schoolchildren - tomorrow's palaeontologists!

The footprint theme is neatly continued in the museum signage:



The coastline is spectacularly beautiful: looking towards Lastres from the museum grounds.  This part of northern Spain isn't how people tend to imagine Spain.  It's forested, green and can be quite wet!  We were lucky enough to see lots of wild flowers too on our trip to the region - orchids, daffodils, hellebores, especially when we were up in the mountains.



The museum grounds are laid out as a "Dinosaur Park", with a large number of models.  Not always of the highest artistic quality or presenting the most accurate depiction of anatomy, but great hits with the children.  The museum's mascot is the Diplodocus nicknamed Manín:




There's a Camptosaurus - a change to see a less familiar creature.



Also less familiar, a Dacentrurus:




But the "Old Faithfuls" are there too: first up, Triceratops:




An Allosaurus, sporting a good deal of display coloration:



The laughing Pteranodon!



Cute is covered too in the shape of a Parasaurolophus mother and baby:



Another large sauropod, this time Brachiosaurus:



A sample of the sort of educational info. supplied at the side of each model:



And waiting to welcome the children as they emerge from their buses, the obligatory toothsome T. rex, bunny hands and all:



What isn't so obvious from the above photo is how niftily his tail is wrapped round the tree!  We collectors all know the problems of stability associated with bipedal models!



I had a great deal of fun wandering through their grounds, even if I was quite a bit older than the children.  But we did some more serious visiting too.  The next installment will be my group's "behind the scenes" visit.....

[DinoToyForum]

Thanks for sharing! Some of those life size sculptures seem to have been inspired by dinosaur toys (I recognise the Papo Triceratops, Papo Parasaurolophus, Schleich Brachiosaurus, for starters).

I hope you had a good trip. I really need to go one day.

[ITdactyl]

Oh wow, thanks for sharing these pics.  I thought those figures looked familiar...

That Dippy looks nice, but something about the "cheeks" makes the face look a bit off.

The price on those burgers though... wow.  I should stop complaining about the rising cost of food here...

[ceratopsian]

Thanks for the astute observation on the relationship to toys.

It's a great museum and I would have liked longer in it. Well worth a visit.

Thanks for sharing! Some of those life size sculptures seem to have been inspired by dinosaur toys (I recognise the Papo Triceratops, Papo Parasaurolophus, Schleich Brachiosaurus, for starters).

I hope you had a good trip. I really need to go one day.

[ceratopsian]

After wandering around the outdoor models, we went for a quick coffee before being taken behind the scenes for a tour of some fossils in the reserve collection.  First of all, apologies that the indoors photos aren't wonderful.  I need more practice indoors with the camera!

We were all impressed by a large slab bearing multiple pterosaur prints.  (Here with my booted toe poking into the photo to give an idea of scale.)



A detail - the pes print immediately to the left of the vertical crack is really clear:



There was also a life reconstruction propped up by this fossil - I don't know the artist for certain but think he is probably Arturo de Miguel.  I was surprised to find many in our group were out of date on pterosaurs and hadn't come across the modern idea of a powerful quadripedal launch and still thought they would only be able to take off with the help of a convenient cliff or similar.  The palaeontologist showing us round interpreted some of the prints on the slab as swimming/wading in shallow water with the feet just touching the ground.



Personally, I find fossilised ripples fascinating.  They make me almost feel I'm there in the past by the ancient sea.



Fossilised desiccation cracks.  Some of my drought-stricken garden looks a bit like this at present!



The Asturian Jurassic coast is famous for its footprints: here a theropod's print - you can see the hint of claws at the toe-tips.



Some of the footprints are so clear that they retain a clear impression of the scales and pads of the dinosaur's foot, in this case a theropod.



Two natural casts of ornithopod footprints:




Sitting by them was a print of a group of hypsilophodontids.  It appears on pp. 152-53 of Atlas del Jurásico de Asturias, a rather splendid book I bought in the museum shop - of which more later!  The artist is Arturo de Miguel.



Here's a stegosaur dorsal vertebra, held in the hand of a young woman of average build:



And finally, something that might have been on the dinosaurs' menu - benettitales foliage and false flowers:



And some tiny cones, with a friend's finger to give scale:



My next installment will show some of the museum gallery exhibits.

[Halichoeres]

That's a great set of fossils, especially the pterosaur trackway. I agree that the preserved ripples are very evocative.

[ceratopsian]

Here's the next installment of my museum trip to MUJA.

We spent so long in the reserve collection that I didn't have as much time as I'd have liked in the museum galleries.  I'm always slow wandering round museums and it seemed rushed.  One of the problems of group travel!  (We were going to visit a footprint site later, so time was not so flexible.)

I mentioned earlier that the museum building was designed to look like a three-toed dinosaur footprint.  Each toe contains one of the three Mesozoic periods.  And here's our starting point: as a museum worker, I liked the way the periods were set into the floor.  Very neat!





Each of the three periods has a main "showpiece" exhibit in the round, supported by a massive artwork showing the creature in its habitat.  For the Triassic, the star is Plateosaurus:



I didn't notice anything identifying the artist who created the panels and haven't yet tracked this information down.  An e-mail to the museum went unanswered.  Perhaps I'll try again......



The museum has many labels in English, and the information supplied here was:
"Many remains of Plateosaurus have been found in "bone bed" deposits located in Germany and Switzerland.  These "bone beds" are interpreted as the result of mud traps in which a large number of specimens became entombed."  The painting illustrates one such mud trap.


I thought it was a nice touch that along one wall, there was a series of photographs of palaeontologists who had been or are associated with MUJA.  Not surprisingly in an area rich in dinosaur footprints, there was a photo of Martin Lockley.




Looking up into the ceiling structure - or at the dinosaur toe!




And on into the Jurassic, represented by a display of Camarasaurus:






I thought it was an excellent idea to show a Diplodocus skull (cast) alongside the skull of a modern horse.  This really brings home just how relatively small sauropod heads are.




I was taken with a panel with artwork illustrating sauropod diversity around the world:


Left: Shunosaurus from the Jurassic in Asia; middle: Amargasaurus, from the Cretaceous of South America; right: Rapetosaurus from the Cretaceous of Africa.

That's all for today.  Next up will be a section devoted to the Jurassic in Asturias, then the Cretaceous (with a most unusual Tyrannosaurus rex display); and the shop.

[RaptorRex]

Nice pics. The artist of the murals is Raul Martin.

[Jose S.M.]

Nice photos. Thanks for sharing. Looks like a great place, I like the skeletons displayed with the mural in the back. Gives a sense of the environment they lived in.

[ceratopsian]

Thank you!  One mystery solved.

Nice pics. The artist of the murals is Raul Martin.