Today I’ve got five questions for Federico Fanti, the lead author on a paper published a few weeks ago in PLoS ONE on a nesting oviraptorosaur. I first met Federico during the 2007 Nomadic Expeditions Dinosaurs of the Gobi expedition, in which we all had a grand time prospecting for dinosaurs and during which we celebrated a fine discovery indeed. Continue reading
Cool Stuff
“Cool Stuff: The University of Alberta Museums Do Winter” is a winter-themed exhibit that opened last week at the U of A’s Enterprise Square location. I checked it out last weekend and was pleased to see so many different types of objects on display. We have 28 different collections on campus, and most (maybe all?) were represented in the exhibit – butterflies, moss, picked parasites, textiles, and more. Continue reading
Spared no expense.
Well, this weekend marked a major milestone for me: I saw Jurassic Park on the big screen for the very first time! Although I have watched it countless times, first on VHS and then on DVD, Victoria in 1993 was only 9 years old, squeamish, and easily scared by, well, scary stuff, and thus too small to see Jurassic Park during its initial theatrical release. Continue reading
5 Questions for Phil Bell
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s interview with Caleb, here’s an interview with Phil Bell of the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative. Phil is a former Currie Lab member who completed his PhD last spring, focusing on the Mongolian and North American hadrosaur Saurolophus. He recently published a paper on skin impressions in Saurolophus. Thanks to David Lloyd of the Tyrrell Museum for the great photos of work at the Dragon’s Tomb in 2010! Continue reading
5 Questions for Caleb Brown
I’m very pleased to present another UALVP-related study today, this time by Caleb Brown (formerly at the University of Calgary and now at the University of Toronto). Caleb recently published a paper in PLoS ONE featuring one of my favourite UALVP specimens, our Stegoceras partial skeleton, UALVP 2.
5 Questions for Stephanie Blais
I’m hoping to feature some more University of Alberta-related research over the next few weeks, and first up is an interview with Stephanie Blais, a UALVP grad student studying ischnacanthid acanthodians. Stephanie recently published a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology with new information on the origin of vertebrate teeth. So without further ado, here are five questions for Stephanie Blais: Continue reading
Care of Magical Creatures
The University of Alberta is currently hosting an exhibit called Harry Potter’s World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine, in the John W. Scott Health Sciences Library. Let’s Talk Science, a Canadian science outreach organization with a U of A chapter, was asked to organize ‘classes’ for a Harry Potter-themed science day, so my good friend Scott Persons and I put together “Care of Magical Creatures”. You may think it would be hard to mix magic and mythology with science, but we were pretty happy with how much natural history education we were able to convey over the course of the day. For those interested in science outreach and education, here’s how to do your own Care of Magical Creatures class. You might be surprised by the results!
Let it snow…
Well it’s a balmy -37C windchill here today (but just -27C without, so it’s not so bad! right?), and wonderfully snowy, and what do you know but there’s an article about our day in Dinosaur Provincial Park last December.
You can read Ed Struzik’s complementary (and complimentary) pieces in the Edmonton Journal:
“Science rewrites assumptions about prehistoric animals.”
and
“Dinosaur hunter Phil Currie shows no sign of slowing down.” This one features a nice video of us preparing the Daspletosaurus jacket for the helicopter lift, and the helicopter lift itself.
Houston Museum of Natural Science
On my way home from Buenos Aires I had an eleven hour layover in Houston. Having just about exhausted the entertainment potential of the Houston airport on my nine hour layover on the way down, and feeling quite confident that there was no way I could stay awake the whole time if I stayed in the airport, I decided to venture in to Houston to poke around for the day. I managed to visit the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Houston Zoo, which are both located in the immensely pleasant Hermann Park.
Birds at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales
After finishing up with the dinosaur hall at the Buenos Aires natural history museum, I was pleasantly surprised to find more dinosaurs when I headed upstairs. I can’t recall a time where I’ve actually seen dinosaurs in the bird gallery – often the dinosaur story ends with the origin of birds, but when the birds are on display it’s usually more about extant bird diversity and conservation. So it was really nice to see the origin of birds explained right at the very beginning of this exhibit. Continue reading
pseudoplocephalus 