Hairy Museum of Natural History

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!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Rogaine.