“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
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
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.
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
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!
A diversion today before I finish my Argentina posts, since we did something really cool (cool! get it? ha!) yesterday. Continue reading
A shark flew! Continue reading
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
For the last several years, our lab has run a volunteer fossil prep program on weekday evenings. As the school year starts again, I thought I’d share our recruitment poster for this year! Continue reading
pseudoplocephalus 