Sep
18

Jake’s Take: Deep Time from a kid’s perspective

Ask any kid what they want to see first when they visit the Smithsonian, and the answer is almost always “the dinosaurs!” The recent opening of Deep Time at the National Museum of Natural History received a lot of media attention,but we wanted to get the opinion a a really tough critic: a 12-year-old boy.

Torch contributor Amy Rogers Nazarov recently took her son Jake to visit the new Hall of Fossils, recording snippets of their conversations as they moved through the exhibition.

Jake in Deep Time Exhibition

(Amy Rogers Nazarov)

Amy: This is an early hoofed mammal. Look, he lived 56 million years ago in Wyoming. He’s a predecessor of a horse. Or maybe a cow.
Jake: They had Wyoming back then?

Jake in Deep Time

(Amy Rogers Nazarov)

Mom! The sky is filled with dinosaurs!

Jake in Deep Time

(Amy Rogers Nazarov)

Amy: What did the mom and dad dinosaurs do for their babies?
Jake: They protected them. And taught them how to swim.

Jake in Deep Time

(Amy Rogers Nazarov)

Time for a quick movie break.

Jake Nazarov in Deep Time

(Amy Rogers Nazarov)

Amy: Darwin helped to figure out our closest living relatives were apes and monkeys.
Jake: Is a chimpanzee an ape?
Amy: Uhhhh…I’m not sure. What’s Darwin doing in the statue?
Jake: He’s looking at the dinosaur.
Amy: What’s on his shoulder?
Jake: A bird!
Amy: Which is descended from the….
Jake: (breaking into Spanish) dinosaurio!

Jake in Deep Time

(Amy Rogers Nazarov)

Jake: Is this before humans?
Amy: Yes! What did the earth look like before humans?
Jake: There were no cities. And no Minecraft.

 

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Posted: 18 September 2019
About the Author:

Amy Rogers Nazarov writes about D.C. culture & history and manages social media for non-profits and small businesses from her home on Capitol Hill. Her byline has appeared in Cooking Light, The Writer, Psychology Today, The Washington Post and many other print and Web publications. Before going freelance, she spent a decade reporting on high tech for a wide array of newspapers and magazines.