What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Happy Campers

 

This is Happy Jack's (or as it used to be called, Old Mexico Ranch), an old homestead occupied by Happy Jack Jackson from 1903 to 1942. There are a couple of log cabins, some with cacti growing on the roof. Happy Jack's is found on the north side of the Red Deer River in Dinosaur Provincial Park, and is the home base for the Currie Lab when we do fieldwork in DPP.

 

 

The cabins are full of rattlesnakes, so rather than camping right out in the field, we have a really nice spot in the cottonwood grove near the river. The night I took this photo there were 18 people in camp, but most of the time our crew is around 10 people. 

 

 

The badlands around Happy Jack's have been very productive for the last five years, and we've collected several very nice skeletons that unfortunately I can't say anything about yet (but I promise they're good). This year we didn't have any major finds, but we did a lot of prospecting and collected lots of interesting small things. In the photo above, a bunch of us are checking out an articulated hadrosaur, that was unfortunately too far gone to be salvageable or worth collecting. It was a nice spot on a sunny day, however, so nobody minded too much. There are always more bones in Dinosaur Provincial Park.

 

 

And when I say there are always more bones, I mean it. Dinosaur Park is kind of a ridiculous place. There are so many bones that we only collect things that are complete and well-preserved, so I didn't bring back the vertebra you can see in the lower left of this picture (although I did get a hadrosaur frontal from this spot). There are many places where you can't help but walk all over bone fragments, because they are just so numerous.

 

 

And then there are bones that look like they're straight out of a 'How to be a Palaeontologist' book, like this femur my friend Scott found.  

 

 

We have some awfully nice scenery in camp.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Danek Bonebed

The summer is over and school is back in session. Here in Edmonton the leaves already started to turn yellow last week. And somehow the summer got so busy that I hardly posted anything at all here. So, it's nice to fix that up and talk about what I did on my summer 'vacation', by which I mean the time that undergrads are not at university but grad students are.

 

The 'summer' (which doesn't really start until mid-June in Edmonton, but whatevs) started up with the PALEO 400 field school in early May. For three weeks, students help excavate the Danek Bonebed, a hadrosaur bonebed located right in the city (but in a secret location, to prevent vandalism). Over the course of those three weeks, they get to do everything: shoveling lots of dirt, uncovering bones with fine tools, plaster jacketing, carrying heavy things back to the truck, quarry mapping, field identification, you name it. Each student comes up with a research project related to the bonebed and writes a paper and/or presents a talk in October. This year we had five enthusiastic students and I am looking forward to hearing all about their projects later this fall.

 

 

 

The Danek Bonebed is in a protected nature area, and as such we have to follow special rules to protect the surrounding environment. To prevent sediment runoff into the adjacent creek, we have to be careful about how we dispose of our unwanted dirt and rocks. This involves clearing an area in the forest nearby and removing and saving the topsoil. All of our dirt is evenly distributed in the cleared area, and at the end of the fieldwork the topsoil is places on top of the spoil pile. This helps the vegetation regrow more easily.

 

Once the spoil area is prepared, we can beginning digging in the actual quarries. We have been excavating this bonebed since 2006, and our three quarries are starting to get pretty large. This part is really hard work and quite time consuming, but luckily there are always lots of hands to take turns shoveling, carrying buckets, and hauling the wheelbarrow.

 

 

 

Here's the main quarry as of this year. The notch cut out in the foreground is the newly excavated area for 2012. Most of the sediment overlying the bonebed is glacial till and/or fluvial sediments, much of which is fairly easy to shovel except for the large boulders sitting immediately above the bonebed. The trickiest part this year was getting through some of the frozen soil, which required pickaxing. Yup, in May the ground was still frozen.

 

 

 

The original quarry, shown here, was first excavated by the Royal Tyrrell Museum in the late 1980s. We have expanded it a little over the last few years, and it proved to be the most productive area this year.

 

 

Almost all of the bones in the bonebed are from a large hadrosaurid (duck-billed dinosaur). We don't really find articulated skeletons, but lots of isolated, jumbled elements. The sediment around the bones is really easy to remove - no hammers and chisels required, just garden trowels and dental picks. The bonebed is within the Horseshoe Canyon Formation, although I'm not sure exactly which unit.

 

Once the bones come back to the university we have a pretty dedicated team of volunteers who help clean them up during our evening volunteer prep program.

Thoughts on Tarbosaurus, Part 3

Previously in this series on the poached Tarbosaurus skeleton, I've discussed the role of museums in fossil collecting, how the specimen was identified as Tarbosaurus, and how we know the skeleton came from Mongolia. Today, I'll discuss one final question: Why is fossil poaching such a big deal, anyway?

(Various museum trips, manuscript deadlines, and fieldwork in Dinosaur Provincial Park have kept me from returning to the blog as quickly as I had hoped, and much has transpired in the Tarbosaurus case in the last few weeks; in particular, see Phil Currie's article in New Scientist. Hopefully, posting will become a bit more frequent, and optimistic, in the next little while.)

To me, it seems obvious why fossil poaching is a big deal (in a bad way) - it reduces or removes access to fossil specimens, and reduces or removes important information about that fossil. First, let's talk about access to fossils. As I discussed in part 1 of this series, the role of museums is to conserve artifacts for present and future generations; additional responsibilities include facilitating research and education, and usually involve displaying objects to the public. Private owners of fossils have no such responsibilities. Some private collectors may choose to display some of their fossils to friends and family, or may even open their private residence to visitors. But they don't have to, and most fossils held by private collectors are probably only ever seen by a handful of people. For really common, super-abundant fossils, perhaps this is not a terrible thing. Vertebrate fossils are rarely common and abundant, and each specimen often has important information to contribute to the study of any particular organism.

A second point about access that is probably not widely known is that palaeontologists cannot really study or publish on privately-held fossils. This is because other palaeontologists may not be able to access those specimens to verify the original palaeontologist's findings, and so therefore the science would not be reproduceable. There are probably lots of instances where private collectors have made substantial contributions to museum collections by donating their discoveries or purchases, but while the specimen is privately held, it is, for all intents and purposes, 'invisible' to the scientific community. A specimen that cannot be published in the scientific literature does not contribute to our understanding of the fossil record, and represents lost knowledge. This is why it is important for fossils to be in recognized institutions like museums or university collections, so that palaeontologists (and the public!) can study the material and use it to better understand our world.

Next, let's talk about how poaching reduces the information content of fossils. Fossils do not exist in a vacuum. The sediments encasing a fossil are nearly as important as the fossil itself, as these provide at least two crucial pieces of information about the fossil: 1) how old it is, and 2) what the depositional environment was. Interpreting the age and depositional environment of a rock is not always easy, and requires specialized training in geology in order to be done properly. When a fossil is yanked out of the rock with no attention paid to where or how it was found, important information is lost.

Pop quiz! Is that the Nemegt or Baruungoyot Formation?

Finally, and most obviously, poaching can damage the fossils themselves, if the poachers do not have the appropriate tools or training to properly excavate the fossils. The more a fossil is broken, the more information is lost. Collecting fossils is tricky, difficult work that requires a lot of patience and strength. Without the right tools and people, fossils get broken. Amateur or commercial collectors may be excellent record-keepers and skilled excavators, and so this may not be a problem - but from my experience at least in Mongolia, poachers don't seem to be really good at collecting the dinosaurs they aim to sell.

 See those white bone fragments there? Those used to be a Tarbosaurus skull.

I hope the attention given to the Tarbosaurus auction marks the beginning of the end of fossil poaching in Mongolia, although I suspect I may be being overly optimistic with that sentiment. But fossil poaching and destruction is not limited to Mongolia, as evidenced by a tragic story that happened basically in my backyard this week. A few weeks ago, the University of Alberta and Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative field crews found a beautiful hadrosaur skeleton, with skin impressions, along the Red Willow River near Grande Prairie. The PCDI team was excited because this would make for a great display specimen (not to mention it being a scientifically important specimen) for the museum they are working very hard to get funded and built. Earlier last week while in Dinosaur Park, we received the terrible news that the partially-excavated, plaster-jacketed specimen had been vandalized and severely broken. We're not sure who did it or why. Even earlier in the summer, an in situ display of the Pipestone Creek Pachyrhinosaurus bonebed had been smashed and vandalized as well.

In Alberta, excavating fossils without a permit, or damaging fossils, can get you a $40 000 fine and/or a year in prison. Nowhere else in Canada has fossil protection laws as good as Alberta's, and in no other province is the general public as widely educated about fossils. Fossils are everywhere in Alberta, we have an abundance of museums and public outreach, several universities conduct palaeontological research, and there's an active amateur society. And STILL people feel the need to wreck our fossils - no, scratch that, THEIR fossils. I find this intensely discouraging, and I don't have a good solution.

Given the recent international attention on the Tarbosaurus case, I hope Alberta sets a good example by prosecuting the fossil vandals to the fullest extent possible, if they are able to catch them. At the very least, I hope that this provokes a renewed interest in protecting our amazing fossil resources. Wherever you're from, support your local museums and universities, and be interested in the natural world around you. It will take all of us working together to protect it.

Thoughts on Tarbosaurus, Part 2

In my last post I talked about the role of museums in conserving fossil resources, with regards to the recent news about the Tarbosaurus auction. I wanted to address some of the other frequent comments I have seen on blogs and news articles. So, we’re now on to:

Comment 2: How do we know the tyrannosaur came from Mongolia? (and the related question, which I’ve decided to lump with this one: Why does the auction company, and subsequent news stories, refer to the specimen as Tyrannosaurus bataar while palaeontologists call it Tarbosaurus?

The first thing we need to address with these questions is the concept of ‘species’. In high school, most of us will have learned that a species is defined as a group of interbreeding individuals that can produce fertile offspring. This is called the Biological Species Concept. What many people may not know is that this is just one of many species concepts. Palaeontologists can’t go back in time to check on which dinosaurs were interbreeding, so the biological species concept can’t really be used in palaeontology. Instead, we generally use the Morphological Species Concept, which essentially boils down to ‘a species is a group of individuals that look like each other and not like others’.

Much of the arguing and debate in palaeontology results from the problems associated with the morphological species concept, and that is because individuals from the same species can look different from each other, and individuals from different species can look similar to each other. Biologists working on still living (‘extant’) animals need to worry about three main sources of morphological variation:

1.      Changes that occur during growth: An older individual of the same species can look different from a younger one.

2.      Sexual dimorphism: Males and females of the same species may look different.

3.      Normal individual variation: Individuals within a species can look different from each other because of normal variation resulting from small genetic differences and environmental differences. As an example, think about all the different dog breeds there are today. All dogs can interbreed (theoretically, although surely a Great Dane crossed with a Chihuahua must be pushing the limits of what is practical...) and produce fertile offspring, and belong to the same species, Canis familiaris. On top of that, all dogs are descended from domesticated grey wolves, and so many scientists regard them as a subset of the species Canis lupus. In taxonomic terms, this is called a subspecies, and we would write it as Canis lupus familiaris.

 Via Wikimedia Commons.

Palaeontologists need to add one more source of variation because we work with fossils, and that is:

4.     Changes that occur during fossilization (‘taphonomy’): Most fossils preserve only the skeleton, and so information from soft tissues like colour, integument, and muscles is lost. Skeletons become disarticulated, and individual bones get broken. All of this reduces the amount of information we have to work with. Finally, the remaining bones can become squished and distorted because of the extreme forces that occur as rocks form.

 Disarticulated Argali sheep skeleton in Mongolia, 2010.

Finally, it is important to remember that the natural world doesn’t always fit into discrete categories, and that the concept of species, genus, etc. is something that humans have created to help sort living things into workable categories. How many differences do two populations need to have in order to call them different species? How many differences until we split things into different genera? There isn’t really an answer to those questions, and so deciding on what are ‘species-level’ differences vs. ‘genus-level’ differences is the source of much debate.

But that’s ok, because that is a big part of what is fun about taxonomy and palaeontology!

So, moving on to Tyrannosaurus rex vs. Tyrannosaurus bataar vs. Tarbosaurus bataar. Tarbosaurus bataar and Tyrannosaurus rex have several morphological differences in the skull, but these are not necessarily obvious if you’re not accustomed to anatomical terminology or used to looking at skulls. Nevertheless, they are present, and there is an excellent, free to access paper in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica that you can go download right now to see for yourself. In a nutshell, the skull of Tarbosaurus is narrower than Tyrannosaurus when you look at it front on, and the nasal bones (the bones along the top of the snout) are domed near the front of the eyes. Additionally, the arms of Tarbosaurus are proportionately even shorter relative to the rest of the body than those of Tyrannosaurus, which are already pretty short.

Tarbosaurus bataar partial skull at the Palaeontological Institute in Moscow.

Tyrannosaurus rex skull at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta.

It’s pretty clear that Tarbosaurus bataar and Tyrannosaurus rex represent different species, because these differences are geographically separated. Small-armed, narrow-skull tyrannosaurs are only found in Mongolia, and longer-armed, wider-skull tyrannosaurs are found only in North America. You could make an argument that perhaps the differences are insufficient to warrant having two genera, in which case the genus Tyrannosaurus has priority over Tarbosaurus because it was named first. However, most palaeontologists accept both the genus Tarbosaurus and the genus Tyrannosaurus as being valid. So why did the auction house consistently call their skeleton Tyrannosaurus bataar? I can’t say for sure, but I suspect it is because Tyrannosaurus is much more a household name than Tarbosaurus, and this makes the skeleton more recognizable and interesting. It’s easier to tell someone your skeleton is a Tyrannosaurus than to do what I’ve just done here and explain how there is a similar, but different, tyrannosaur in Mongolia called Tarbosaurus.

So, we can look for anatomical features in the skull and skeleton that indicate whether or not the tyrannosaur was a Tarbosaurus or a Tyrannosaurus. But how do we know that the skeleton came from Mongolia? Well, much like certain animals today are found only in certain places, some dinosaurs were found only in some places and not others. Tarbosaurus has so far only been recovered from the Nemegt Formation, a set of rocks that are only known in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. If the skeleton is shown to be a Tarbosaurus, and not some other species of tyrannosaur, then the conclusion we must come to without any additional information is that the specimen comes from Mongolia. We can also use the colour and preservation of the bones to identify where the skeleton came from, because different rock units will produce differently coloured fossils (in Alberta, dinosaur bones are often brown or black, and in Mongolia, they are often white or reddish).

If for some reason there was good evidence that the skeleton did not, in fact, come from Mongolia, that would only make the specimen more scientifically important, as it would extend the geographic or stratigraphic range of the genus Tarbosaurus and would give us important new information about that genus.

I had originally hoped to post this second part much sooner, and so much has transpired since my original Tarbosaurus post. I’m particularly pleased to see that a delegation of Mongolians and palaeontologists examined the auctioned Tarbosaurus this week as part of the investigation into the specimen. You can read their report at the Painter Law Firm's website. I also highly recommend this article at the Guardian by palaeontologist Dave Hone, and many thanks to Brian Switek at Dinosaur Tracking for his kind words about my first post in this series.

Literature!

Hurum JH, Sabath K. 2003. Giant theropod dinosaurs from Asia and North America: skulls of Tarbosaurus bataar and Tyrannosaurus rex compared. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 48:161-190.

Thoughts on Tarbosaurus, Part 1.

Last time I promised photos of our fieldwork here in Edmonton, but then over the weekend the palaeoverse kind of erupted (in a good way) over the auction of a Tarbosaurus skeleton. Go read Brian Switek’s articlefirst if you’re not acquainted with the story.

Because I am insane, I often read the comments sections on news articles about palaeontology. There are a lot of weird and misguided statements in the comments sections of some of the Tarbosaurus auction news articles (e.g. at CNN, USAToday, Wired). Some of these comments make me frustrated, so I figured I’d try to write down my thoughts on some of the most common recurring themes: 1) Paleontologists are just as bad as fossil poachers and/or private collectors because we hoard the dinosaurs all to ourselves and lock them away in cabinets where the public can’t see them; 2) How do we know the tyrannosaur came from Mongolia?; 3) Why does the auction company call it Tyrannosaurus bataar while palaeontologists call it Tarbosaurus?; and 4) Why is fossil poaching such a big deal, anyway? I’m going to address these over a couple of blog posts because for some reason on these topics I am unusually longwinded and the answer to the first question was getting kind of gigantic.

So, to start with: “Paleontologists are just as bad as fossil poachers and/or private collectors because we hoard the dinosaurs all to ourselves and lock them away in cabinets where the public can’t see them.”

I sort of understand where this sentiment is coming from, but unfortunately it is wholly incorrect, and it saddens me that there folks who have become disenfranchised with science in this way. The role of museums is to conserve artifacts for the long haul – not just a few years, not just this generation, but theoretically for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Museums also facilitate scientific research (thus contributing new knowledge to society), and education (passing new and old knowledge to members of society). Although there are privately-run museums, many museums in Canada are at least partially supported by the government – ie. the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Because these are publicly-supported institutions, their role is to conserve cultural and natural history artifacts for the people, and so the whole concept of fossils being locked away from the public in museums is largely incorrect.

But let’s dig a little deeper (har har). Yes, a lot of specimens are stored in cabinets and rarely seen by the public. This is not because palaeontologists are trying to ‘hide’ specimens, but because at any museum there is limited space and funding for exhibiting specimens. Choosing which specimens go on display involves a lot of factors: is the specimen sturdy enough to be mounted or displayed, does the specimen need to be easily accessible for research, is there enough space to display the specimen, will it require special new cabinetry and lighting, will it require an entire overhaul of the existing displays or can it be slotted into an existing gallery, how much new interpretive material needs to be created, and more. Not all fossils make great display specimens, but that does not mean they are ‘worthless’ or have little scientific value. For example, many studies require the identification and measurement of THOUSANDS of teeth and bone fragments. How else can you know if a particular fossil is rare unless you have a large, unbiased sample? Yes, we could display these tiny fossils, and I actually think that would be a great way to teach the value of large collections of otherwise mundane fossils. BUT given the option of displaying 1000 Paronychodon teeth in a glass cabinet, or one really excellent Albertosaurus skull, it makes sense that the museum would display the showier, more easily relatable object (sorry, Derek). In a perfect world we would not need to make that choice, but in reality there are constraints on what can be displayed based on time, money, and space.

A lot of commenters on the news articles have mentioned that a lot of museums offer ‘backstage tours’ to the collections areas. While this is true, it is also true that many museums require visiting researchers to be professional palaeontologists associated with either a museum or university (or to be a student studying towards that profession). I can’t speak for all museums here, but I suspect that the main reason for limiting visitors to the backstage areas comes back to conservation of the material. A lot of fossils don’t do well with repeated handling, and even gentle handling by careful scientists (or contact with things like metal calipers!) can gradually erode and damage specimens. As such, limiting access to the collections is not really because we want to hoard the fossils and keep them to ourselves, but out of concern for the long-term safety of irreplaceable objects. The flip side of this is that some museums have dedicated teaching and outreach collections of sturdier specimens that can be handled often.

But a lot of these comments seem to come back to a sense of distrust of professional palaeontologists, and perhaps a distrust of the ‘scientific establishment’ as a whole. I don’t really know what to say to this – yeah, there are probably some really awful people who are also palaeontologists, who don’t look kindly on amateur palaeontologists or private collectors, and who may be generally unpleasant people to be around. But there are awful people in every profession. It doesn’t excuse their behaviour, but there’s not necessarily a lot any one of us can do about it. From my experience, the vast majority of professional palaeontologists are just that – professional. They are excited to learn more about life on earth, to contribute to the scientific record, and to educate the public about those findings. They like dinosaurs (or brachiopods, or trilobites, or sabre-toothed cats) SO MUCH that they literally want to spend their entire career thinking about them ALL THE TIME. (There is no escape.) Many of them would love to display more of their fossils, but are unable to because of lack of funding or space. So, if you are really and truly concerned about the lack of public access to fossils, the best thing you can do is go out and support your local museum. Petition your local or provincial or federal government to make museum funding a priority. Participate in fundraisers or organize your own. Donate your time by volunteering as a fossil preparator, or go out into your community and teach others about palaeontology. The worst thing you can do is support the illicit trade of poached, illegally-acquired specimens. And we’ll talk about why in the next post.

(And if you want to help out re: the Tarbosaurus auction, there's a Change.org petition you can sign.)

LogiCON and the Paleo Gala

Fieldwork has begun here in Edmonton and I'll have some more pictures to show off next week...currently we are digging a big hole in the dirt, so there's not much to see yet. Until then, here's a wrap-up of some of my outreach and teaching activities from the last few weeks.

In addition to the Alberta Paleontological Society Symposium, I was asked to give a talk at a local skeptic's conference, called LogiCON. This was a pretty neat event with lots of interesting speakers divided into three 'tracks' - beginner, advanced, and family. I gave both a family-track and advanced-track talk, which may have been a little overly ambitious, but worked out in the end. For the family-track talk, I did "The Wonderful World of Dinosaurs", which was essentially an overview of the kinds of dinosaurs found in Alberta and a little bit about how palaeontologists study dinosaurs. There are lots of well-known Albertan dinosaurs, so I also included some lesser-known taxa like Chirostenotes (using the Smithsonian's caenagnathid mount as a stand-in), Albertonykus (using Mononykus), and the newly-named leptoceratopsids Unescoceratops and Gryphoceratops.

For the advanced-track talk, I thought about talking about dinosaurs as ambassadors of evolution, but didn't really feel like talking about creationism, so instead I opted for "The Dinosaur Family Tree", a talk about...systematics! Complete with data matrix! Woohoo! Actually, this seemed to go over fairly well, as I went through the problems that palaeontologists (and most biologists) face when trying to reconstruct the tree of life: understanding sources of variation, defining a species, and running phylogenetic analyses. And we talked about what makes a dinosaur a dinosaur, as well. The diagram above is based off a specimen on display at the U of A Paleo Museum (UALVP 300, a composite of three individuals), with various dinosauromorph, dinosauriform, and dinosaurian features.

Finally, a few weeks ago I helped organize the annual U of A Paleo Gala, an event hosted by Dr. Michael Caldwell, which raises funds for specimen acquisition, research, and grad student scholarships. It's a fancy dinner held at our faculty club, and the grad students put up posters and show off new specimens and research. There are silent and live auction items much like at SVP, and you can usually count on a song or two by John Acorn, the Nature Nut.

Those of you who were at the SVP in Las Vegas may recognize a few of the larger faces in this crowd... other recent acquisitions largely include specimens for our teaching collection, like casts of Tiktaalik, Anhanguera, Eotitanosuchus (=?Biarmosuchus), and Dinodontosaurus.

Well, that about covers it for now! Next week, the field!

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!)