These are a few of my favourite things.

Well, it's been ages and ages since I posted, yet again. I have good reasons (as always) and will post more details soon, but for now I wanted to highlight some books and art by some of my friends, colleagues, and folks I just know from the blogosphere but who I think are pretty cool. Although it's probably getting too late to ship things in time for Christmas, I hope you'll keep these folks in mind throughout the year when you find yourself in need of palaeo-related gifts.

Niroot Puttapipat is an illustrator based out of London. His work is unlike anything else out there, and his dinosaurs have a lot of heart and humour. You can purchase books and prints via the Folio Society, and prints and other giftware at deviantART and RedBubble.

 

 

Lara Shychoski lives in Drumheller and is an awesome wildlife and palaeoartist! Her scratchboard illustrations always completely blow me away. You can purchase prints of her work at deviantART.

 

 

Dinosaur family crests, what more can I say? I'm a total sucker for minimalist graphic design, so I'm a big fan of David Orr's work. You can buy prints and other giftware at Red Bubble. 

 

 

 

All Yesterdays probably needs no introduction to anyone reading this blog, but having received my hardcopy in the mail last week I really have to reiterate what many others have said: it's a great book with a creative take on the way we reconstruct ancient animals. Make sure to look for the mountain manatee in the "All Todays" section. You can purchase it in ebook format from Amazon, or as a paperback from Lulu.

 

 

I'm looking forward to ordering a copy of A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds and other Winged Dinosaurs after Christmas - it looks like a great compendium of information on animals that don't always get much play in popular dinosaur books. It's available at Amazon.

Published by the University of Alberta Press, Deep Alberta (by John Acorn, the Nature Nut) is a great resource for those interested in the palaeontology of Alberta - and not just the dinosaurs, either! Each two-page spread features a short story about special fossils, places, and people in Alberta.

 

The "Moment in Time" books are a little harder to get these days, but you can often find used copies through Amazon or Chapters. There are four books in the series - A Moment in Time with Troodon, Albertosaurus, Centrosaurus, and Sinosauropteryx. Each book is a little vignette into the life of a dinosaur, followed by lots of detailed information about the science behind the story.

And finally, please consider helping out the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Grande Prairie, Alberta, which recently got the go-ahead to begin construction! They are offering Cretaceous Christmas Gift Packages, which include t-shirts, fossil replicas, museum society memberships, and more. Or, you can donate directly to their IndieGoGo campaign, which has some really cool perks like signed copies of the Moment in Time books, palaeoart by Julius Csotonyi, and even the sold-out glow-in-the-dark Pachyrhinosaurus coin!
 

Waking up from hibernation.

And by hibernation, I mean grad school. The last few weeks have been pretty busy here in Edmonton and I've found myself without a lot of time to blog about interesting things that have been going on. Thankfully, that busy-ness is a result of research productivity and teaching, which are both good things! So, over the next few days, as we head into the (still somewhat cold) field season here in Alberta, I'll try to cover a bit of what's been happening for the last couple months...

First up: Alberta Paleontological Society Symposium

I can't believe it's been more than a month already since the APS symposium! The Alberta Paleontological Society is a group of amateur and professional paleontologists from around Alberta, which organizes summer field trips and an annual symposium and workshop series. The symposium is always a good time, and there's usually palaeontology professors and grad students from the University of Calgary, University of Alberta, and Royal Tyrrell Museum (plus often other institutions like the T. rex Discovery Center, Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre, Tumbler Ridge Museum, and Grande Prairie Regional College). This year I gave a talk about my travels in Korea, China, and Mongolia last summer, and was also invited to host a 3-hour workshop the following day.

 

 

Because I was expecting a largely adult audience (rather than families or mostly small children), I had to come up with something a little different than previous dino-workshops I've given. What do you do that's hands-on, not super boring, and not a craft? Well, two years ago I, and my fellow grad student Mike Burns, had given a talk about the frequent (and usually hilarious) misrepresentation of ankylosaurs in the popular media, and it had been a big success. So I decided to run with that. I brought with me a bunch of ankylosaur casts (skulls, a tail club, a foot), and some real fossils (osteoderms, thin sections, teeth), and lots and lots of popular reconstructions of ankylosaurs, mostly in the form of toys (or, uh...scientific models?) and books. These were scattered around the lab, which holds about 20 people.

 

 

 

Over the course of the workshop, I talked for about 10-15 minutes at a time about the anatomy of ankylosaurs, starting with a general overview, then moving on to the skull, skin/armour, tail, and legs and feet. We finished up watching a couple of clips from various documentaries and talking about posture, movement, and behaviour. Each workshop attendee picked 2 or 3 reconstructions to evaluate during the workshop, and had a worksheet to make notes about the anatomy of their reconstructions. After I would talk about some aspect of ankylosaurs, there was 10-20 minutes for looking at specimens, discussing the pros and cons of different reconstructions, and asking questions. Then I'd call everyone back together and ask who had the worst/best reconstructions and why.

If you're ever called to do a dinosaur or paleontology workshop for adults - do this! It was lots and lots of fun. It required fairly minimal preparation, which is a plus if you're often asked to do this sort of thing. I spent a couple of hours at most putting together a powerpoint of mostly specimen images, picking out books and toys and fossils to bring with me, and making up some handouts). It's a great way to engage adult learners, and could probably easily be restructed to work for kids or families as well.

More importantly, I think this might be a really effective way of communicating a lot of information about paleontology in a way that will encourage the general public to look at popular science more critically. Since most people will generally not be going to the primary literature to answer their paleontology-related questions, their information is going to come from illustrated books, magazine

articles, computer animated documentaries, and museum exhibits. If I had just discussed the anatomy of ankylosaurs via presentation and specimens, I'm not sure a lot of the points I discussed would have sunk in as much as they did by critiquing the illustrations and toys most people are likely to encounter. This was an easy way to make a talk more hands-on, and the casual atmosphere and conversation between the workshop attendees was really great.

The next APS Symposium will be held on Saturday, March 16, 2013. The symposium is always held in the Jenkins Theatre at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta.

(Thanks to Angelica for taking some photos of the workshop!)

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. 

The University of Alberta Laboratory for Vertebrate Paleontology contributed fossils from our Grande Prairie and Edmonton dinosaur bonebed excavations. Although we usually collect stuff in the summer, we've had snow during our Edmonton fieldwork, even in May.

We showed off some field jackets, too. The Monoclonius and ornithomimid are pretty self-explanatory, and if I recall correctly, "Skull B" is from the Wapiti bonebed in Grande Prairie. There were also photos from our December tyrannosaur helicopter lift in Dinosaur Provincial Park, including a photo taken by me!

Last spring we purchased a cast of the Cryolophosaurus original non-reconstructed skull for both teaching and research, but it fit in perfectly with the exhibition theme! The grey slab behind the skull is the Wonder Block from the MOTH locality, which has a variety of 'jawless fish'. Phil will be giving a talk about his 2011 Antarctic expedition on March 1, as part of the exhibition's speaker series.

The exhibition also features specimens from our zoology collections, including these Arctic and sub-Arctic mammals (caribou, deer, and walrus).

"Cool Stuff" mixes natural history objects with cultural heritage objects, and in particular I was pleased to see so many Inuit and Inuvaliut art pieces. I am always astounded by whalebone sculptures like this one.

Another display had Inuit dolls, musical instruments, hunting tools, and boots. The beautiful paintings in the background are the original art from Ted Harrison's "A Northern Alphabet". Click the photo to make it bigger, and see if you can figure out what letter each painting represents.

"Cool Stuff" is open until March 4, and admission is free. It was cool, go check it out. 

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!

First of all, I cannot thank enough the other BioSci grad students who volunteered to help us out during the day. We handled around 1400 people in 5 hours and it was BUSY. Everyone did a great job and we all had a lot of fun even if we mostly lost our voices by the end of the day. You might notice that the room we occupied was pretty small - in some ways this was good because it allowed for a controlled (sort of) number of people at any given time, but we also ran out of air pretty quickly. There were numerous other 'classes' held in small rooms like this - an Owlery featuring a burrowing owl from the local wildlife rescue, Ollivander's wand shop, Muggle Studies (DNA extraction), Potions (chemistry), Herbology (botany), and many more I can't remember right now.

For Care of Magical Creatures, Scott and I chose a variety of extant and extinct specimens from our zoology and palaeontology collections, using animals that either inspired mythological creatures or that resembled them in some way. We are very lucky to have access to a lot of good specimens, but if you work in a museum or university you might have access to a lot of similar items for your own workshop. We also tried to feature a lot of the animals from Harry Potter, although we didn't get everything and we had some animals that weren't mentioned in the books. Above is a golden pheasant taxidermy specimen; the golden pheasant is one of the possible inspirations for the phoenix.

 

Elephant skulls probably inspired the legend of the cyclops. At this station we also had a Protoceratops skull, which may been the inspiration for the griffin.

 

Scott makes a unicorn! The narwhal tusk was a big draw, and also allowed us to talk about conservation and how we acquire zoological specimens.

 

The manatee skull was also a big surprise to many people - you're looking at the face of a mermaid. We also had a mosasaur skull and real mosasaur jaw at our 'aquatic animals' station. Scott had the great idea to print out some double-sided cards with the mythological creature on one side and the real animal on the other - we would flip over to the real animal after the kids tried to guess what it was. Very helpful when you only have a skull of an unfamiliar animal!

 

For our dragon station, we used animals that had dragon-like qualities, since no one animal is the direct inspiration for the dragon, and because many cultures have their own dragon mythology. We used a cast of the ankylosaur Minotaurasaurus (which looks like the Hungarian Horntail), a komodo dragon skull (a real life dragon!), and our wonderful taxidermied ground pangolin. Not a single person who visited our table had ever seen or heard of a pangolin, so it was a really great opportunity to show off this unusual mammal.

 

We also had a werewolf station with our very weird coyote with a degenerative spinal disease, a grey wolf skull, and a dire wolf skull.

 

Finally, the platypus was used as an example of a chimaera-like animal.

In order to make the activity a bit more hands-on and interactive, we also gave the children a 'specimen card' I had made up. They needed to find all four items, and at the end we had a table with glue bottles for sticking the specimens on. We purchased enough supplies for 1000 people, and in total it cost about $180 CAD to buy:

12 bags of red and yellow craft feathers (phoenix feathers)

2 packs of 500 mixed googly eyes (cyclops eyes)

one paw print stamp and two stamp pads (werewolf print)

3 bags of crushed colourful shells (dragon scales)

6 bottles of sticky craft glue

(Edit: I forgot to mention that this also covered printing 1000 copies of the explorer's card, with two per page, on heavy cardstock.)

 

Our "Care of Magical Creatures" workshop allowed us to talk about not only the real-life inspiration for mythological and magical creatures, but also animal anatomy and functional anatomy, ecology, evolution, and conservation. I'd love to use this workshop again sometime even without the whole set of classes that were available at the event.

Have you ever tried a Harry Potter-related science workshop? Tell me about it in the comments!

Gobi Desert Diaries: All creatures great and small, part 2.

Perhaps the most charismatic of the Mongolian predators is the Snow Leopard, Uncia uncia, seen here at the Natural History Museum in Ulaanbaatar. Sadly I did not get to see one of these great cats, as they are fairly rare and highly reclusive.

This is the closest I got to a hedgehog during my stay in Mongolia, although previous KID expeditions have met hedgehogs up close. This pelt likely belonged to a Long-Eared Hedgehog, Hemiechinus auritus, although a second species, the Daurian Hedgehog Mesechinus dauuricus is found in northern Mongolia. Pelts like these were traditionally placed near the entrance of a ger to ward off bad spirits. I think it is quite interesting the way that the pelt has kept the shape of a curled hedgehog even though all of the bones and innards are gone.

Another important animal on the Mongolian steppe is the wolf, Canis lupus. I’m about halfway through an excellent book called Wolf Totem, a semi-autobiographical book about a young Han Chinese who left Beijing to work in Inner Mongolia with sheep, horse, and goat herders during the Cultural Revolution. There’s a lot of interesting anecdotes about the relationship between humans, sheep, wolf, and grassland. If you’re interested in a unique perspective on the traditional Mongolian lifestyle, I can only recommend this book. You can find the English translation through Chapters.