This Way to the Dinosaurs

Welcome to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science! The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting's welcome reception was held here last week. This museum is trying out some interesting and different exhibition ideas that I haven't seen too often elsewhere, so let's take a look at some highlights. One of the most interesting design elements is the visible escalators poking out the side of the building. Back in 2013 at the Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Project Symposium, Tony Fiorillo gave a really interesting presentation on the design of this museum, and talked about how a lot of people never make it off the first floor of a museum, which is also usually where the dinosaurs are. So at the Perot Museum, the dinosaurs are on the top floor and you are immediately shuttled upstairs (it's actually kind of hard to *not* go to the top floor first!), and then you work your way down the museum to exit. 

The dinosaur exhibits feature some interesting species that aren't found in a lot of other museums - here's a modern take on Tenontosaurus, and the still unnamed Proctor Lake 'hypsilophodontid' (somebody name that guy, already!).

My favourite exhibit in the whole museum! One of the only places where I've seen the North American-Asian faunal interchange visualized in an exhibit. Tarbosaurus is in Asia, and its close relatives are in North America (I can't remember exactly which taxon is featured here, but perhaps it is Bistahieversor based on its geographic position?). Also whoa, Beringia sure looks strange from this polar vantage point.

Another interesting thing the museum has done is to place modern animals alongside the dinosaurs for comparative purposes. Here we've got predators and prey - a mountain lion and a deer, and Tyrannosaurus and the sauropod Alamosaurus (off to the left of my photo).

A similar approach is taken in the Alaskan dinosaur corner - here's the herbivorous Edmontosaurus Ugruunaluk...

...and its extant analogue the caribou (Rangifer!). I wasn't totally sold on this approach, but I was intrigued by the mixture of extant and extinct, and of modern and ancient ecosystems, so maybe I just need to ruminate on it a little more.

I'm a sucker for Sinclair dinosaurs, what can I say.

Does the mould for the Ankylosaurus exist anywhere still??? DO WANT.

At one end of the dinosaur hall you take a set of stairs up to the bird exhibit! I liked this a lot, both because the bird exhibit had some cool interactive stuff, but also because I like the symbolism and narrative structure to traveling upwards towards birds from dinosaurs - it's like moving up the phylogenetic tree, and gaining flight.

From up in the rafters, you get a nice view of the dinosaur gallery, and a great vantage point for examining the gigantic Alamosaurus (real vertebrae are tucked down at ground level behind the skeleton from this angle). Alamosaurus is a weird and biogeographically interesting creature, representing a re-emergence of sauropods in North America after a lengthy hiatus throughout much of the mid Cretaceous. 

ELSEWHERE IN THE MUSEUM...

Rocks and minerals! With gigantic mineral shapes! (My favourite is the giant malachite clump in the back.)

Brains! There's a really fun section on medicine and human anatomy.

Phylogenies! Can you find where humans are located on this giant tree of life?

Outside the museum, we were bid farewell by these very fine green leapfrogs, which surely must be great fun to play with if you are smaller than I am.

More Texas adventures forthcoming - stay tuned!

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Paleo201 comes to an end

The first offering of Paleo201, Dinosaurs in the Fossil Record, essentially comes to an end today with the final field trip of the semester. The students will have their exam later in December.

Even though it is a lot of work to be involved in the creation of a new course, I think Paleo201 is a great addition to the University of Alberta's paleontology offerings. Using the Dino101 content on Coursera, and pitched at an essentially first-year level (despite its 200 designation) for students from all faculties, Paleo201 is what's called a blended learning course. We rely on the Dino101 course videos to deliver the base lecture content for the course, which means we typically only meet once per week for an in-class lesson. These lessons have included research talks by grad students in our labs on topics relevant to each week's lesson. However, we also tried to break away from the lecture format for at least some of the in class lessons, to take advantage of some of the resources available on campus. One week we learned the basics of the rock cycle and general Canadian geology using the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Geoscience Garden, an installation of rocks from around Canada arranged in a particular fashion for students to learn basic mapping skills. And last week we did tours of the Paleontology Museum and our prep labs, including sneak peeks of some cool up and coming research projects. FUN FACT: Our Dunkleosteus skull cast was ranked higher than the dinosaur specimens in my highly scientific 'what did you find most interesting' poll. Blindingly obvious take-home message for instructors: Students like new things and surprises, and dinosaurs are not necessarily the be-all and end-all!

But the highlights, in my opinion, are the three field trips to Jurassic Forest, Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, and the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

Jurassic Forest is a tourist attraction outside of Edmonton that features animatronic dinosaurs set outside in a forest. Although I had some comments that this was an odd place to take students on a university field trip, I actually think it worked really well as a way to ease students into some of the topics covered in the first couple of lessons – basic dinosaur anatomy, diversity, diet, etc. And because a lot of the signage and interpretive material at the forest has been put together by graduates of the UofA's BSc program in Paleontology, the educational content is accurate, up to date, and nicely presented.

Many of the students told me that our trip to Dry Island was the first time they had really gone hiking, so I think that speaks to the value of having a course like this one. We hiked the students around the badlands and out to the Albertosaurus bonebed, stopping to discuss  geology, look for fossils (but not collect any, as we didn't have permits this time), and talk about how we interpret bonebeds and make inferences about dinosaur behaviour. Everyone was SO EXCITED to find little bits and fragments of bones. A couple of the students told me they returned the next weekend with their families because they had enjoyed the field trip so much! Blindingly obvious take-home message for instructors: Students like to go outside! And while videos and online stuff and lectures are perfectly fine, doing 'real' things with real fossils and real locations etc. etc. can never fully replace the online experience. Also I got artists and history students and linguistics majors and such to like rocks, so there.

And today we headed down to the Tyrrell Museum, which is a bit of a long day trip from Edmonton, since Drumheller is a little more than 3 hours away – but we were helped along by some dino documentaries. As always, the museum is an amazing resource, and it was super fun to see the students putting together many of the different concepts learned this semester. There were many good questions and enthusiastic discussions about the things we were seeing. And of course, having Phil there to talk to the students about the history of the museum and some of his personal experiences in collecting many of the fossils on display is pretty cool!

Because this is partly an online course, one of the things I've tried to incorporate into the field trips is discussion of the field trip in the course discussion forums. Each time the students have had to take a picture of themselves with a backdrop of choice (favourite dinosaur at Jurassic Forest, favourite scenic view at Dry Island, favourite display at the Tyrrell) and tell us something about it. This worked really well and it is also a fun way to get some feedback about what people are twigging onto as interesting in the course. Fun fact: Not everyone's favourite dinosaur/etc. was T. rex! There is hope for the world!

This is the last course for which I will ever be a teaching assistant, as my grad school days are wrapping up in a few weeks. This course was lots of fun to teach, hopefully has been fun to take, and I hope future students and instructors have as much fun as I did!

Houston Museum of Natural Science

On my way home from Buenos Aires I had an eleven hour layover in Houston. Having just about exhausted the entertainment potential of the Houston airport on my nine hour layover on the way down, and feeling quite confident that there was no way I could stay awake the whole time if I stayed in the airport, I decided to venture in to Houston to poke around for the day. I managed to visit the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Houston Zoo, which are both located in the immensely pleasant Hermann Park.

The museum has a nice dinosaur hall featuring this Tyrannosaurus about to maul an Edmontosaurus to death, a Diplodocus, and an impressive Quetzalcoatlus. The museum is building a new dinosaur exhibit, and although I was sad I did not get to see it (it opens this summer), it was good to see their current display.

I also really liked this detailed information panel that showed not only which bones were real, cast, or sculpted, but what specimens they were derived from.

Whatever your feelings on the oil industry, there is no doubt that geology plays a hugely important role in locating and extracting petroleum resources. It is fitting that the Houston museum would have a large and informative gallery on petroleum. To be honest, when I looked at the museum map and saw this, I was pretty sure it would be super boring, and my background is in geology and I like stratigraphy a lot. But lo! It was tons of fun! And there were a lot of people there enjoying themselves, too! The gallery starts with a lot of geology, then moves on to the engineering side of things. I thought the introductory exhibit on stratigraphy was pretty cool - different features on this big faux rock face lit up as the narrator discussed them.

There was a cool window display showing two geologists discussing life in remote field locations. This was a pretty neat trick, because the video of the two geologists was projected onto a nearly invisible piece of glass or plastic such that they looked like they were right in the diorama. Also there was a lady geologist, HOORAY!

And there was even a giant seismic reading printout! Where do you ever see this sort of thing? Next to this was a tank with a seismic air cannon that would go BANG! every few minutes. Not too much discussion of how this affects marine life.

If I had a criticism of the gallery, it was that there was not a whole lot of discussion of the dangers of petroleum exploration and extraction or the environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. But we hear about that in a lot of other places, and it was so refreshing to see the science on exhibit, that I guess I will forgive them for that.

Flying away again...

I arrived in Ulaanbaatar last Saturday and am heading out to the Gobi Desert tomorrow morning. I’ve got a few blog posts that will appear while I’m away, but emails and facebook will be on hiatus until I return in late September.

However, I will leave you with a few palaeo notes and photos before I disappear for four weeks. During the Flugsaurier Symposium Scott and I had the opportunity to go on a field trip to Liaoning province to visit Jehol group outcrops and museums. Yesterday I posted a few photos of the Chaoyang Geopark. Today I’ve got some pictures of the Sihetun Fossil Museum and Darwinopterus field locality.

Outside the Sihetun Museum was this great expanse of Jehol Group outcrop. We all got to try cracking open some rocks, and many conchostracans and insects were found.



The Sihetun Museum had several very nice Psittacosaurus specimens, like this rather squashed fellow.



A particular treat of the trip was to visit the locality where Darwinopterus was collected, in the middle of a bunch of corn fields. It was interesting to see how Jehol rocks are typically quarried – the farmers find a productive level and then tunnel into the hillside. Unfortunately, this isn’t a very safe method for collecting.


I leave you with a final photo of my fine fangly friend Zhenyuanopterus, a huge boreopterid pterosaur from the Jehol.

Take care everyone and I’ll see you in September.