The trains no longer come to Cincinnati’s Union Terminal. As with most of America’s passenger rail system, it long ago gave way to the automobile and Cincinnati today sits in the confluence of several interstate highways. The old Union Terminal, however, has found new life as the Cincinnati Museum Center. The terminal itself is a beautiful example of art deco architecture and worth going to see for its own sake. But it also contains several museums, including the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science.
As I wrote in my last entry, the Cincinnati region is rich in fossils from the Ordovician Era and there are naturally a good collection of these in the museum. The highlight of the paleontology section, however, is a nature trail through the Ice Age. The visitor walks through the exhibit on a pathway modeled to resemble the frozen landscape of southern Ohio as it would have looked 10,000 years ago. The murals and life-sized models are based on fossils from Big Bone Lick, which is barely an hour’s drive south on I-75. You pass through icy caves, walk among a pack of dire wolves and encounter all sorts of other extinct animals, from Pleistocene peccaries to a Mastodon mired in a pool and en route to becoming a fossil at Big Bone Lick. 
There is also a replica of Megalonyx jeffersoni, a giant ground sloth named for president Thomas Jefferson, who collected and studied fossils from the region. Ah, would that more politicians were equally interested in science today. It was partly in hope of finding living examples of such animals that Jefferson authorized the famous expedition of Lewis & Clark across the continent. A burning scientific question of the day was whether it was possible for animals to become extinct. Today, of course, we know only too well that they can.
The museum also has some nice Cretaceous exhibits and an actual cave to explore. The Museum Center also contains a children’s museum, the Cincinnati History Museum and an Omnimax theater. So if your travels bring you to Cincinnati, take in a Reds game, dine in a chili parlor, and by all means visit Union Terminal.
