“THAT’S ENORMOUS,” a young girl in a flowered dress exclaims while checking out the shell of Hesperotestudo, a giant land tortoise, on display at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. But she quickly pushes ahead of her parents and brother in a stroller, her attention diverted from the two-million-year-old, early Pleistocene fossil to a wall of windows that looks into the museum’s lab. “Look!” she shouts, pointing and drawing her family toward the equipment and fossils in various states of conservation.

Part of the museum’s Back to Bones exhibit, which displays recent and noteworthy discoveries in New Mexico’s 500-million-year-old fossil record, the nearly intact tortoise shell was found in the state’s bootheel. Yet, the room is filled with wonders from all across the Land of Enchantment. I’m captivated by the partial skull and jaw of Bistahieversor sealeyi, an early relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, found in San Juan County. The highly detailed 3D-printed cast (the actual fossil is too delicate to display) feels even more menacing than the full animatronic version of the “Bisti Beast” in the museum’s lobby. 

A young visitor get eye-to-eye with a dinosaur at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, in Albuquerque. Photograph by Tira Howard.

For most of the families on this summer Sunday, however, the kids’ interests provide the gravitational pull. Near a display of what Albuquerque looked like 150,000 years ago, a little boy separates from his group and heads toward the Columbian mammoth. “This is cool, Dad. It’s huge!” Upstairs, in the Hall of Ancient Life, a girl plays with a video screen of the Earth, moving evolutionary time forward eons with the drag of a finger. “There is so much water,” she says to her mom, of the planet’s appearance roughly 600 million years ago. A boy clutching a red stuffed dinosaur picks up where she left off and flashes forward 400 million years to the brown land masses in the Paleozoic era. “It’s all mashed up!” he exclaims.

You can find this kind of energy and sense of wonder in museums big and small throughout this month’s “Exhibit New Mexico” feature. Whether you’re drawn to archaeology, geology, art, or local history, these museums provide a fresh perspective not just on the past but how we look at the present day and even the future our kids will inherit. 

Before leaving the Museum of Natural History, I make a last stop at the Animal Armor traveling exhibition, featuring ancient shelled crustaceans, dinosaurs with spiky tails, and bony-plated reptiles. It’s a nice evolutionary reminder to protect our most precious resources: our children, our land, our cultures, and our history. 

Read more: Rediscover the new and improved Museum of Natural History and Science.