Hairy Museum of Natural History

There’s more interesting things going on in the noösphere than I’m currently able to write about, so its time to collect all the disparate threads into another patented HMNH hairball:

New specimens of the Cretaceous fossil bird Gansus yumenensis have been described, looking surprisingly modern for their time. GrrlScientist has a thorough writeup, the Carnegie Museum has a press release with a ton of images, and Science has the paper.

In other Cretaceous theropod news, Darren Naish has a worthy post on basal tyrannosaurs over at his Tetrapod Zoology blog.

One of the very first paleo-bloggers, El PaleoFreak, has created this 3-D digital model of the “fishapod” Tiktaalik. Read more about its creator’s hopes and dreams for his virtual offspring inTiktaalik looking for work (en Español, naturalmente).

Speaking of Tiktaalik, readers may recall the iconic artwork that the HMNH’s Curator of Ich-Theology, Ray Troll, created for the discovery of this fantastic transitional form. Ray has a new line of ichthyological apparel out for 2006, including spiffy T-shirts of Charles Darwin urging us all to “Embrace Our Inner Fish.” I have a feeling that this one is going to grow legs, so head on over to Trollart.com for details on how to get one before they all crawl away.

I recently came across the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Sonic Scenery project, where “the museum invited a spectrum of innovative musicians and composers to create music inspired by our collections.” I don’t think I’ll get to experience the music in the museum’s exhibit halls anytime soon, and I wish that there were more than teasers available to download from the project’s myspace page. But I do applaud the LACMNH for working “to provide visitors with an opportunity to find new meaning and relevance in the Museum’s collections,” and recommend the CD to any and all museumophiles out there.

Also from Los Angeles, an interesting article in the LA Times on the crisis confronting traditional “space artists” who find their extraterrestrial paintings overwhelmed by the photographs that today’s technology can provide. I’m sure that paleo-artists have some time before anyone figures out how to point a camera back in time and take a snapshot of prehistoric earth, but, as in astronomy, I’m sure the results will be more fantastic than anyone could have imagined…

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Miscellany, Recent Discoveries.