Before her daughter grew old enough that it was no longer cool to hang out with her outdoorsy mom, Laura Potter took her to most of Nebraska’s State Parks, but none more often than the Schramm Education Center near Gretna.
There, they would greet and be greeted by Big Snap Daddy, a common snapping turtle believed to be the world’s largest.
“When my daughter was really little, she used to call him a dinosaur, and I was like, ‘He’s not a dinosaur,” the Omaha mom and viral crustacean advocate recalled this week. “And then later on, as she got older, I’d go, ‘There’s your dinosaur. And she’d go, ‘Mom, that’s not a dinosaur.’ She would finally be able to recognize him as a species of snapping turtle…