Today I published a revision of the North American ankylosaurid genus Euoplocephalus. I’d like to take some time to go through some of the major points of the paper over the next few days here, but today I will give a brief introduction to the motivation behind this study.
Euoplocephalus is one of those ‘classic’ dinosaurs. Named in 1902 (as Stereocephalus, which was preoccupied by…a beetle! of course), it wasn’t known from very much material. All that Lambe had was a chunk of the snout/forehead region, and an unusual structure called a cervical half ring. Cervical half rings are totally bizarre structures that seem to be unique to ankylosaurids. They’re made of an underlying yoke of fused bone segments, and topped by fused osteoderms like you see on the rest of an ankylosaur’s body.
Canadian Museum of Nature 0210, holotype of Euoplocephalus tutus. On the left, the skull chunk. On the right, the first cervical half ring. Images modified from Arbour and Currie (2013).
In addition to working through the home stretch of my PhD, an exciting project has kept me hopping for the last few months. I’m part of the team creating the University of Alberta’s flagship MOOC, in partnership with Udacity: Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology. If MOOC is a new acronym for you, don’t worry – it was for me, too. There will be three flavours, so to speak, of Dino 101, but all will feature the same online content. Dino 101 will be available through Udacity, for free, to everyone around the world. Registered University of Alberta students who want to take the course for credit will register for PALEO 200 (online only), or PALEO 201 (same online content, but with additional in-person activities like field trips).
Working on Dino101 has been a great experience for me so far, even though it can be challenging. We’re working closely with educational specialists to make sure the pedagogy is sound, and that our assessments will be rigorous. We want to make sure that real learning will occur. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the foundational aspects of the course, like what our learning outcomes will be, and what skills will be tested. I’ve been learning a lot about educational theory – even though the scale of MOOCs is new, there’s a lot of people on board with this project who have researched the best ways to deliver and assess online content. We also have a great team working on unique interactives for the course, which should enhance the experience for students.
As we finish off scripts and move into production, I’m looking forward to seeing some of the cool ideas we have planned for teaching the basic concepts of dinosaur palaeontology come to life. I also hope that this course will serve as a springboard for people who are interested in animal biology and geology, and that everyone will come away with a better understanding of the scientific method.
I hope we’ll see you in Dino101 when we launch this September!
(Check out the UofA’s official Dino101 page for more information and to sign up for updates.)
Some of you are already aware of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, which is scheduled to be built in Grande Prairie, but certainly all of you are aware of Philip Currie himself. As part of the final push to raise the remaining construction funds, we have launched a crowd-fundraising campaign on www.indiegogo.com/curriemuseum. The aim is to raise $1,000,000 in 120 days. In the first hour alone, we raised $1,600!
Every donation, no matter how small, is important and donors are rewarded with a range of increasingly cool gifts including a museum logo pin, t-shirts, and original artwork by palaeo-art master Julius Csotonyi. It’s all outlined on the website, so please check it out, spread the word, and help us build a world-class museum and research institute.
Now that I’ve talked about the ROM‘s current offerings of temporary special dinosaur exhibits, I thought I’d turn my attention to the permanent fossil galleries. The ROM has long been one of my favourite museums, and as a student of palaeontology the only museum I have visited more often for my research is the Tyrrell. The last five years have seen some major renovations at the ROM, including the construction of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Continue reading →
The Royal Alberta Museum is also currently hosting a temporary exhibit on the use of feathers in hat-making (millinery!) and fashion, called Fashioning Feathers. I’m not usually all that into the history of costume and fashion in museums, and so I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting I found this particular exhibit. I think it was the intersection of biology and fashion that was so neat.
I had a chance to visit “Wolf to Woof“, a travelling exhibit hosted by the Royal Alberta Museum this summer. This exhibit does a nice job covering the biology and evolution of dogs, and the relationships between canids and humans, and overall I was pretty happy that I got to see it.
This is Happy Jack’s (or as it used to be called, Old Mexico Ranch), an old homestead occupied by Happy Jack Jackson from 1903 to 1942. There are a couple of log cabins, some with cacti growing on the roof. Happy Jack’s is found on the north side of the Red Deer River in Dinosaur Provincial Park, and is the home base for the Currie Lab when we do fieldwork in DPP. Continue reading →
The summer is over and school is back in session. Here in Edmonton the leaves already started to turn yellow last week. And somehow the summer got so busy that I hardly posted anything at all here. So, it’s nice to fix that up and talk about what I did on my summer ‘vacation’, by which I mean the time that undergrads are not at university but grad students are.
The ‘summer’ (which doesn’t really start until mid-June in Edmonton, but whatevs) started up with the PALEO 400 field school in early May. For three weeks, students help excavate the Danek Bonebed, a hadrosaur bonebed located right in the city (but in a secret location, to prevent vandalism). Over the course of those three weeks, they get to do everything: shoveling lots of dirt, uncovering bones with fine tools, plaster jacketing, carrying heavy things back to the truck, quarry mapping, field identification, you name it. Each student comes up with a research project related to the bonebed and writes a paper and/or presents a talk in October. This year we had five enthusiastic students and I am looking forward to hearing all about their projects later this fall.
pseudoplocephalus 