Journey Into Blacksun will feature the kids of the gang, instead of the gang of seven themselves.
What is your opinion of this? Do you think that the new characters give oppertunity for more development, or that it is too much of a deviation from the spirit of the Land Before Time?
On one hand, I am sad that the story won't be from the point of view of the LBT characters I know and love, and I do have some fear that it almost won't feel like a LBT story with its cast of characters that are in many ways similar to the original gang, but not the same. On the other hand, you have already pulled off stories and characters that I never expected to be as good as they turned out, and I have read at least one other LBT fanfic (an unfinished story by Almaron) that centered entirely around OCs, with no canon LBT character playing more than a marginal role, and yet still managed to be very good (at least in my opinion). I trust your writing ability to create another great LBT story from this premise.
How was your trip? 
It was fantastic.
We didn’t have time for nearly all of the things I had hoped to do, but we had a lot of fun.
As I know you’ve seen, I gave a brief overview of my trip
here; if you want to know anything more specific about my vacation, just ask.
The museum visit was especially enjoyable because my brother and I met a guy in the Dinosaurs & Fossils exhibit who saw that we were interested in prehistoric creatures, and spent quite some time conversing with us, showing us several fossil replicas that weren’t displayed in the exhibit, and telling us about the fossils. One of the things we learned from him was that you can tell whether or not a dinosaur had cheeks covering the sides of its jaws, and how far they would have extended, by looking at the neurovascular foramina; small holes around the edges of the mouth that supported blood and nerve passages. He pointed out that an
Allosaurus skull had several prominent neurovascular foramina along most of the length of the jaws, so the only fleshy tissue between its jaws would have been at the very back; in short, it had no cheeks. A “
Camptosaurus” skull, however (
Camptosaurus has recently been found to be the victim of a
Brontosaurus-esque mix-up in which the skull of a related dinosaur,
Theiophytalia, was mistakenly attributed to it, so most museums and artistic representations of
Camptosaurus show it with the wrong head) had very few, if any, foramina along its entire mouth, so it probably had cheeks that began just behind the beak at the front of its jaws. He also gave us a little test to see if we could identify a cast of a certain fossil. It was about a foot and a half long, gently curved, and pointed at one end. He told us that he frequently showed to kids who visited the museum, and that they had variously identified as a claw, a tooth, a rib, a beak, a horn, a spike, and even a tail. My brother and I both recognized it immediately: the claw of a
Therizinosaurus cheloniformis.
Our first visit to the Mall of America was just my brother and me (I think our dad came in, too, but he never crossed paths with us). We mostly just wandered around, checking out stores we’d never seen before and eating dinner. The store we spent the longest at was an old favorite of ours, the
Rainforest CafÈ, a restaurant decorated to look like a rainforest, with fake vines and plants covering the ceiling, walls, and fake trees and rocks that were everywhere; cylindrical tanks of tropical fish; recordings of rainforest sounds and thunder; lights that would periodically go dark and flash to simulate a storm with lightning; a system of “troughs” (made to look like rock) with water sprinkling into them from above, to create the sound and appearance of rain; and animatronic creatures such as giant butterflies and a crocodile lying in a pool that would growl, lurch forward, and open its jaws (The pool was filled with coins that people had thrown in, and my brother and I performed our tradition of attempting to “feed” donations to the crocodile,
trying to toss pennies into its mouth. We both succeeded at least once).
On our second MOA trip the next morning, our main stop was
Underwater Adventures, an aquarium in the east wing of the Mall, built entirely underground, and FILLED with tanks of aquatic animals, both freshwater and marine. We’ve been to it several times before, and never get tired of it. The highlight of the aquarium is the giant glass tunnel through a series of tanks, one filled with Minnesotan fish (e.g., sturgeon, bass, paddlefish, and the odd duck, the alligator gar, normally found much farther south), another featuring fish of the Amazon River (arapaima, arowana, pacu, various catfish), another coral reef creatures (tang, angelfish, butterflyfish, triggerfish), and an enormous one containing seven different species of sharks, two species of sea turtles, stingrays, sawfish, guitarfish, a shark ray, groupers, and various other kinds of fish (I’m guessing Alex would love this place
). Sadly the bamboo sharks and cownose rays that had formerly inhabited the aquarium’s touch tanks (basically an aquatic petting zoo) had “retired”.
The greatest mishap that occurred on the trip was that I forgot to recharge the battery of my digital camera after visiting the museum, so it was almost out of juice even before we were done with
Underwater Adventures. Fortunately, I was able to buy another battery at the mall that was about three-quarters charged, which was enough to last me through most of the trip to the Minnesota Zoo.
We reached the Minnesota Zoo sometime after 1:00 (1:15?) in the afternoon, and stayed almost until closing time at 6:00, mainly because of me
(I spend a long time at zoos, partly because I like to take so many pictures
:). They had a temporary exhibit featuring animals of the African rainforest, including colobus monkeys, dwarf crocodiles, and red river hogs. I was a little disappointed, though, that the exhibit’s bat caveówhich I had previously read about in a brochureócontained only one species of bat (
Eidolon helvum, the straw-colored fruit bat). Not only did I know the species well from the zoo back home, but there were supposed to be at least two others in the exhibit, according to the signs outside the enclosure. Moreover, both of the zoo’s nocturnal exhibits were undergoing (or had already gone) renovation, and the bats that used to be there were gone (It was the same case at the National Zoo when I went there last year <_<). I seem to have abysmal luck when it comes to seeing bats.
Still, the Minnesota Zoo was great. At 3:00 we watched the KAYTEE World of Birds Show, a presentation featuring trained birds that would fly or run out to a handler who would share facts about them. The first bird to be introduced was described as being found around the world, sacred and symbolic in many cultures, and probably the single most important bird in human history………the chicken
(specifically a red junglefowl). Other avian stars were a sulphur-crested cockatoo, a crowned crane, a red-tailed hawk, a peregrine falcon, a hyacinth macaw, a galah (rose-breasted cockatoo), a bald eagle, a spectacled owl, and a Eurasian eagle owl, plus some random birds that appeared briefly onstage early on in the show, such as a crowd of ducks.
After the show was finished, my brother and I walked most of the length of the zoo’s enormous outdoor trail. Towards the end of it we discovered another new exhibit (this one permanent) called “Russia’s Grizzly Coast”, which featured brown bears, Amur leopards, wild boars, sea otters, and other animals of northeastern Asia.
When I get the chance, I'll post some photos.
