The Boneyard #19 is online at Familiarity Breeds Content, and Laelaps has something special planned for the 20th edition of this paleo-carnival.
And check out the seventh installment of Linneaus’ Legacy, over at The Ethical Palaeontologist.
Last week, Roxanne and I (along with a handful of other folks from the NMMNHS) popped up to Denver for the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Museums. Lots of nifty stuff to see and hear, Denver’s great selection of museums to visit, and among the thousands of attendees were plenty of old contacts to catch up with and new museum folk to meet. I sat in on several great sessions dealing with museum exhibitry, interactive tech, and engaging web visitors, and as I spent some time going through my notes I’ll keep an eye out for interesting tidbits to post here. But for now I’ll put up some quick pics from the Museum Expo—dozens of vendors of all stripes packed into the Exhibit Hall of the Colorado Convention Center.
As might be expected, my picture-taking skewed heavily toward the paleo:
A cast Velociraptor skeleton and life restoration at the Pangaea Partners booth. Very nice coloring/patterning on the feathers:
This beauty was sculpted by Dennis J. Wilson of Pangaea Designs.
A rather different flavor of feathered theropod was on display at the Phil Fraley Productions booth:
This fantastically meticulous restoration of a dodo (on the left, of course) was commissioned by the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity in Singapore. Reprints of a pair of articles detailing the work that went into this piece were available at this booth, but are also available for download from this page.
The above models of a lobefinned fish and early tetrapod caught my eye at the Whitman Zahourek Foundation booth. The Foundation promotes anatomy education, and brought to my attention the Anatomy in Clay classes/manikins, which provide plastic skeletons of dogs, horses, and humans that allow for the attachment of plasticine “soft tissue” structures, as in the muscles attached to “Caniken,” below:
For me, this looks to be an excellent way to gain a more intuitive understanding of how muscle attaches to bone in paleo-restorations—certainly much less ‘visceral’ than dissection. Not that I’ve got anything against viscera, mind you, but I’ve always preferred additive processes to reductive ones. I’ll definitely be looking further into this.
Wish I could say that I’ll be posting more regularly, but I’m afraid things are going to continue to be slow here as I focus most of my time/energy into the upcoming Triassic exhibit at the Day Job—when I last mentioned it we were shooting for a March deadline, but the final opening date has since (thankfully) been set at May 17th. Now less than two weeks off…
The lucky thirteenth edition of The Boneyard, a bi-weekly collection of paleo-themed blog posts, is up at Greg Laden’s Blog.
In which I play “catch-up” for a few sites overlooked in my absence (note the partially-updated blogroll to the left). Today I’ll point out some excellent posts from the past few months dealing with different aspects of the Permian:
First up, Will at The Dragon’s Tales has had a couple of great articles on two of the more charismatic groups from the latter days of the Paleozoic: the carnivorous, sabre-toothed gorgonopsians and the herbivorous, tusk-beaked dicynodonts. Plus, he notes that there are some fantastic restorations of Permian vertebrates showing up on Wikipedia.
Speaking of dicynodonts, The Lord Geekington, mentions the ubiquitous Permo-Triassic straddler Lystrosaurus in his review of aquatic habits in stem-group synapsids. At the other end (that is, the beginning) of the Permian, he also discusses the potentially piscivorous pelycosaur Ophiacodon.
Finally, I recently came across the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Prehistoric CSI blog, whose archives are chock full of fossil finds from Seymour, Texas—a treasure trove of Early Permian vertebrates—with videos and photos, and field sketches by Dr. Robert Bakker.