#someone does need to clean all the sticky handprints off the glass though

[phantom-of-the-501st]

Turns out I didn't have to hand out any brochures at the event, I just had to answer questions. 🥳 But there were some interesting moments, so here are some highlights!

Someone explaining to a toddler clutching an entire stack of postcards that they couldn't just take every single one with elephants on

An old woman explaining to her nearly-blind husband that the skeleton he was looking at wasn't a camel, like he thought it was, but a dinosaur (it was a camel)

Multiple exasperated parents telling their kids that no, they don't know where to get a tiny elephant from

A child very confidently announcing that a giant salamander was a snail

Me explaining to a man that kiwi eggs do actually take up that much space in a kiwi

Trying to explain to kids how we came to own multiple dead animals and that no, most of them were not just found lying around

One of my lecturers then just deciding to tell the truth about where they all came from (there was some minor trauma)

Finding out that there are 6 year olds who know more about animals than I do

Someone telling us that their child now wants an entire jar of shrews (for context, we have an entire jar of shrews and the child now wants one just like it)

A child seeing the giant snake skeleton and saying "TOO MANY LEGS" before they went away slightly traumatised (they unfortunately didn't quite grasp the fact that they were just ribs and the entire thing wasn't some kind of horrific millipede)

Anyway, it was amusing and we did actually teach some people some things! (Also seeing kids running sound being overly excited by animals is adorable because that was me as a child).