Virginia v. Brown

While commuting to and from a close friend's wedding in South Carolina this weekend, I visited two natural history museums I hadn't been to before: The Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville and the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History in Charleston. Both were very much worth the visit, and their collections had a surprising number of items in common:

Pteranodons

Male Pteranodon (Virginia)

Pteranodon family (Brown)

Pteranodon father (Brown)

Pteranodon mother and chicks (Brown)

Ground sloths

Megalonyx (Virginia)

?Paramylodon (Brown)

Megalodon

Megalodon (Virginia)

Megalodon (Brown)

Whales

 Eobalaenoptera (Virginia)

Maiacetus (Brown)

Waipatiid whale (Brown)

The "Wando Whale" (Brown)

Although the Virginia Museum was much larger than Mace Brown (which consists primarily of two rooms at the College of Charleston's School of Sciences and Mathematics Building), it was a more general natural history museum, with a wings devoted to geology and modern animals in addition to fossils. Mace Brown's two exhibit rooms, in contrast, had more fossils than they knew what do with. In addition, admission was free, vindicating a hour-long trek to Charleston from the Isle of Palms morethan the Virginia Museum did for driving an hour out from Lynchburg.