Fossil
Paul Sereno, one of my FAVOURITE palaeontologists, is coming to @ROMToronto this Sunday and I could not be be MORE excited. Except for maybe those times when I was a kid…
(cue time travel sound effect- swosh swish swash)
When I was a kid I had a pretty strict bed time. For grades 3 through 5, bed time was somewhere around 8-9PM. Very rarely were exceptions made. About the only time I ever remember my mom letting me stay up was for one of my favourite tv shows, Paleoworld.
Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing “Embraceable You” in spats.
~Woody Allen
Contributed by Peter May, President, Research Casting International Ltd.
We held a press preview day at our shop last week to launch the ROM’s major summer exhibition – Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants from Gondwana. Of the 17 dinosaur skeletons to be exhibited, ten are pretty well finished; just final paint to be applied.
Fig. 1. Reconstruction of a Massospondyus nesting site. Courtesy J. Csotonyi
Join us Thursday, December 1 from 11 am to noon EST as we live blog from the ROM during the launch event for the Burgess Shale Virtual Museum of Canada. This online exhibition is the most current and comprehensive resource for knowledge on one of the world’s most important fossil sites.
After three days of successful fieldwork on the chilly Grand Rapids Uplands, we return – toting a fresh batch of fossils – to The Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. This is the home turf of my colleague, Graham Young, and almost a second home for me.
Marked field jackets containing horned dinosaur bones from the McPheeter’s bonebed (MBB) and the South Side Ceratopsian (SSC).
Ah, the romance of fieldwork. There’s nothing quite like waiting for the morning sun to rise high enough to illuminate a cold, wet outcrop, so that one can spend the next 8 or 9 hours kneeling in mud and splitting razor-sharp rock slabs. But we have hot coffee in the thermos, dry gloves in the pack, and — hopefully — there are some new fossils to be found!
Recently, we visited at the Vertebrate Palaeontology Lab to see how dinosaur bones are extracted from their plaster field jackets after they are hauled back from the field by palaeontologists like Dr. David Evans.
July 27
The weather forecast was pretty much on the money, and a dismal dawn yields to thunder-squalls rolling across the tundra. But, after breakfast and a second cup of coffee, the rain eases and we are a shade more optimistic about our flight out later this morning. Time for one last walkabout of our temporary home.
