We decided to go on an adventure to Fernbank Natural History Museum! We’ve been here before, but once we heard they were having Reptile day on July 30th we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to meet some rockin’ reptiles. Luckily our friend Ayden and his mom came with us!
The dinos look watch over reptile day!
Fernbank is already one of our favorite places in Atlanta with its awesome dinosaurs, its IMAX theater and its new Fernbank NatureQuest, this place is one learning adventure after another! We walked in and the great hall was filled with different environmental groups and animal lovers! And they brought all kinds of reptiles!
Our friend Ayden was excited as we were to meet all the animals! Our first stop was to see a Blue Tongue Skink.
We weren’t able to touch him, being an elephant and a horse, but people could and according to our friends he was very smooth and cool! Blue Tongue Skinks are native to Australia. They’re omnivores and eat insects, fruit and flowers and the best part is they have a blue tongue (sadly the skink wouldn’t show us his though).
As we wandered around the exhibits we stopped by to check out the frogs The Atlanta Botanical Gardens brought! Ok, so frogs aren’t reptiles they’re amphibians, but let’s face it- they’re super cool! We saw several different kinds of frogs but our favorite was the Glass Frog!
Look close and you can see his internal organs!
His skin is very transparent so you could see his internal organs (or insides as Edmond likes to call them)! The Atlanta Botanical Gardens does some great work to help frogs in the wild! We’re definitely going to have to go and check it out!
The next animal we saw was a Red-tailed rat snake 
and we were so lucky to watch him put his tongue out! Did you know that snakes “smell” with their tongues? Because snakes don’t smell through their nostrils; they use their forked tongues to gather particles in the air. They then analyze the particles using a special organ called the Jacobson’s organ! Pretty neat! We wondered what the snake smelled…
This snake was all twisted up in knots! I know this elephant can’t do that, can you? Snakes skeletons are very flexible and enable them to slither, climb and ball up.
Here’s picture of Argentinosaurus! That is one BIG dino!
We then were able to meet a ball python. Again our human friends were allowed to touch but no such luck for an elephant and a horse :(.
These snakes are from Africa and are called ball pythons because when threatened they ball up to protect themselves. That is a neat adaptation!
There were some really amazing turtles and tortoises there too! Including some really big ones, but our favorite was the mata mata.
We’d never seen one before and we thought it was so funny looking! Turns out this master of camouflage is from parts of South America. They use their leaf like appearance to blend in with the rocky bottoms of streams and creeks. It’s an ambush predator and lays in wait for a fish to swim by so they can them suck up! They can’t chew so the fish is swallowed whole! WOW!
We decided to end our day with a couple of snapshots!
We are very little compared to this giant dino 🙂
We made one last stop to snap our picture with an Andean Milk Snake! 
It was such a fun day at Fernbank’s Reptile Day. The only bad part was we wanted to meet Giggy A Dinosuar, hopefully we can meet up next time!
Elephants & Horses love to share!
Range/Habitat: Western-Central Africa/ lakes, rivers
The Adventures of Ellie and Edmond 