Last week, I visited Tsutaya, a chain bookstore in Japan that rents manga and DVD’s.

I felt like I was slipping back into my childhood. I fondly remember visiting our neighborhood rental store in Massachusetts to select a movie for the night. Admittedly the selection was limited; the carpet slightly stained.

But that place always held such a sense of possibility for me! There was a certain fun to flipping through the empty cases on the shelves, a fun that clicking through Netflix cannot not quite provide.

I felt like I spotted a living fossil!

And now a room with some real fossils…

Jumping to another continent (and back in time 4 years), here are some pictures from my time in the Paleontology Department at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.