I love surprises. Which is unfortunate for me, because I am extremely bad at being surprised. And it’s hard to be surprised by things as you get older, and as easier access to more and more information becomes available to us every day.
But boy, when a surprise comes along that actually takes me by surprise, what a thing to be able to savour.
The ROM has another temporary dinosaur exhibit on display right now, Dinosaur Eggs & Babies: Remarkable Fossils from South Africa. It showcases nests and embryos of the prosauropod dinosaur Massospondylus, which were described by ROM and University of Toronto scientists in 2005 (with a subsequent paper in 2010).
The nests were found in Golden Gate National Park, South Africa. Continue reading
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
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!
