Pittsburgh can travel back 80,000 years without leaving the Strip District. Planet Ice: Mysteries of the Ice Ages, now on view at the Senator John Heinz History Center, is an immersive journey through Earth’s prehistoric past that shows how ice, glaciers and a changing climate shaped our world — and the people who learned to survive in it.
Created by the Canadian Museum of Nature, the exhibition brings together more than 100 specimens, artifacts and models, with interactives and multimedia throughout. Visitors come face to face with full-scale skeletal replicas of ice age giants: a mastodon, a giant beaver, a short-faced bear and Smilodon, the saber-toothed cat that disappeared about 10,000 years ago. Hands-on stations even create the illusion of a woolly mammoth or an American lion emerging from a snow-filled landscape.
The story is also proudly local. Western Pennsylvania’s own Meadowcroft Rockshelter — the oldest documented site of human habitation in North America — is represented with authentic Paleo-Indian tools, an elk tooth and passenger pigeon bones, alongside a Buffalo Creek mastodon bone found just seven miles from Meadowcroft and remains of the famous Bridgeville mastodon, plus rare loans from Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Bethany College. At an interactive atlatl station, you can try a prehistoric spear thrower for yourself.
The History Center, at 1212 Smallman Street, is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and kids ages 17 and under always receive free admission thanks to the Kamin “Free for Kids” Initiative — making Planet Ice a cool, curious and genuinely happy family day out.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
