Currie Lab

Care of Magical Creatures

/ pseudoplocephalus / 3 Comments

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!

Continue reading →

Let it snow…

/ pseudoplocephalus / Leave a comment

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.

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose…and you can definitely pick your ankylosaur’s nose.

/ pseudoplocephalus / 6 Comments

Say hello to Euoplocephalus, the best known ankylosaur you’ve never heard of. Besides Pinacosaurus from Mongolia and China, there are more specimens referred to Euoplocephalus than to any other ankylosaurid, and it is certainly the most well represented ankylosaurid from North America. Yet Euoplocephalus often gets overlooked because its younger cousin is THAT ankylosaur, the one that starred at the World’s Fair and was in Jurassic Park III and Clash of the Dinosaurs and Dinosaur Revolution and gets all the cool toys and, you know, is the namesake of the group. You know, Ankylosaurus. Well, hopefully you’ll be hearing more from me about Euoplocephalus over the coming months. Today we’ll be picking its nose. Continue reading →