Amanda, the Self-Designed Student, is within reach of winning a cash prize to help offset her collegiate expenses, and you can help—simply click on the vote box below (or click this link) to help her win the “My Favorite Toy” contest at brickfish:
You are allowed to cast a vote every couple of hours, so vote early and often, as the saying goes. It looks like the contest is in its final few weeks, so there’s still plenty of chances to help a fellow paleo-blogger out.
There is also a prize for the entry that is linked to from the most websites—if you run a blog or other site, you can increase Amanda’s chances of winning by posting a link to her entry in the competition as well.
Apparently this is the first video footage of a live Hispaniolan Solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus), a secretive Caribbean mammal known primarily for being:
Take a virtual stroll through the collections at Hominin.net, an in-process, open-access database of hominin fossils. Assembled by Kambiz Kamrani, Hominin.net can organize fossil speciemens by locality map, timeline, or taxonomy, and an extensive list of literature is available, listed by title or author.
Although the project is still in its early stages (only about 45 specimens are listed as of this posting), it is already showing signs of becoming an amazingly useful resource. It is great to see someone using the open-source Simile widgets to organize natural history specimens—the Timeline component definitely has a lot of potential for paleonotological content. I’m particularly excited about the following planned feature:
• Embeddable snippets of fossils to be used in blogs, websites, etc.
I’m eager to see how this will be implemented—not only would it be handy to have a collection of ‘stock’ images and info for hominin specimens at one’s disposal, it might also be a great guide for researchers and institutions interested in creating embeddable content for specimens and objects in all kinds of collections.
Tip of the Hairy Museum toupee to Afarensis for bringing this to my attention.
In the comments to last month’s Gerrothorax story, Jerry wondered if the bite animation could be saved as a movie that could be used in conjunction with a PowerPoint file for presentation & instruction purposes.
I’ve updated the animation a little bit and exported it as several versions, all of which are available via the original post, or compiled below for your convenience. Feel free to download & use them as you see fit!
Word of warning – not all of these will work on every computer, but hopefully at least one of them will work for you. If there is a specific format that you would like to see, let me know and I’ll see what I can do about posting it.
As we slowly settle into the new year here at the Hairy Museum, it seems only fitting, what with all the resoluteness in the air at this time of year, that I nail to the front door a list of things that I’d like to post/share/accomplish around here in the coming 365 days…
Hominids. A project I’m currently involved in has me learning more about our closest fossil kin than I’d had the pleasure to delve into before. My work on it is to be wrapped up by the end of summer, so there should be more news, notes, sketches, & art on that front later in the year.
Coelophysis. The work I began this year with Larry Rinehart—reconstructing growth series, sexual dimorphs, and the population structure—continues in 2009. As things progress, I hope to be able to share more specimen drawings, skeletal reconstructions, and life restorations of this Ghost Ranch dinosaur.
Continue with the redesign. A new design for the HMNH front-page blog was launched in March 2008, and…pretty much it stayed on the front-page blog. There are a few kinks in the CSS to work out, but what I’d really like to do is implement it on the secondary and tertiary pages of the site, as well. Speaking of the redesign…
Properly introduce the new “Happy Therapsid”. I never did get around to posting about the smilin’ skeleton in the revamped logo. Then again, I never did say much about the old one, either. Perhaps both could be remedied in a handful of posts about the wild and potentially wooly creatures that branched off from the stem of the mammal family tree.
HMNH Library. When I first started transcribing old texts into HTML, there were far fewer resources online for the student of historical paleontology. Nowadays, I’m happy to say, you can hardly click a mouse without coming across some cache of freely-downloadable PDFs, and I’d like to use the Library to begin cataloguing links to other online collections.
Paleo-Pop Shop. What was originally envisioned as the HMNH gift shop has been without product for far too long. One way or another, there will be something stocking the virtual shelves of this store by in time for the holiday season of 2009!
Not to mention the usual hodgepodge of paper summaries, new discoveries, miscellaneous sketches, and links to paleoart and writing across the web. As always, I welcome your comments and suggestions for anything you would like to see (or anything you wouldn’t). Thank you, valued museum visitor, for making the Hairy Museum of Natural History a destination in your online wanderings, and best wishes in the coming new year!
