The Footsteps Through Time exhibit is interactive and designed to be self-directed. Students can touch skull casts, compare skeletons of living and non-living primates, touch tools used by hominids millions of years ago, walk through a Cro-Magnon cave, and much more. The Education Department is offering the following ways to experience the exhibit:

Footsteps Self-Guided Tour
Follow the Footsteps, Timestones, and Knowstones and guide yourself on an interactive scientific journey through time. In Primate Hall, compare your hands and feet to those of living non-human primates. View videos of behaviors that the great apes share with humans. In Hominid Hall, open drawers in the Footsteps Tool Chest and compare ancient stone tools to modern ones used today. Touch fossil casts of "Lucy," a 3.5 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis discovered by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson in 1974. Visit a Cro-Magnon cave and see reproductions of cave art left by humans thousands of years ago. Finally, learn about advances in biotechnology that may change the course of biological evolution. Allow 60 minutes for the Self-Guided Tour.

Footsteps Guided Tour
The Guided Tour combines an interactive session led by a museum docent with self-guided discovery time in the exhibit (see description above). The docent will explore aspects of the exhibit in depth before you begin your journey. For example, learn how natural selection may have favored bipedal walking millions of years ago, or use fossil casts to compare tooth variation among living primates and extinct hominids. Allow 60 minutes for this program.

Costs
Self-Guided Tours are $2.50 per person when booked in advance. Guided Tours are $3.00 per person. One chaperone per 7 students is required. The teacher and chaperones receive free admission and are expected to be active supervisors of their classes.

To register, use the Registration Form on this website, or call (619) 239-2001 to request a brochure.