More of Viktor’s excellent reconstructions, in a variety of media, can be seen at his website: www.anatomicalorigins.com.

On my way back to Albuquerque from the WIPS Symposium, I made a detour over to Woodland Park, Colorado, to check out the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center. This “new species of museum” (according to its tagline) was founded by Mike and JJ Triebold, of Triebold Paleontology Inc., and Mike was gracious enough to come in on a Sunday to give me a tour of the place.

Mike Triebold with a cast of a concretion that had formed within the footprint of a giant coelurosaur.

Mike explained that most of the skeletons on display were casts of specimens that he and his team had molded and mounted (and in many cases, collected and prepared to boot). The displays are constantly changing, as the reconstructed (cast) skeletons are purchased by museums and other collectors, and new skeletons are prepped, cast, & put out for display. In the 20+ years the Triebolds have been in this business, their team has put together some spectacular skeletons:

Juvenile Edmontosaurus. Behind and to the left is a larger Edmontosaurus. A Tyrannosaurus rex looms over the scene, and the pachycephalosaur Stygimoloch can be spotted in the background as well.

Conchoraptor gracilis, nicely showing off the robust oviraptor furcula (wishbone).

One of my favorite mounts was this dramatically serpentine mosasaur Platecarpus

Dueling Pachycephalosaurus—these two have been reconstructed from “Sandy”, the most complete pachycephalosaur specimen known from North America.

I have to say I was quite impressed by what I saw during my visit. The mounts were dynamic and did a good job of showing off the range, skill, and productivity of the center’s staff. The large, open halls packed with skeletons & fossils felt a bit like a mix between traditional museum exhibits and a showroom floor, which I suppose is not an entirely inaccurate description. In some ways (none bad) I felt the crowding of the casts on display made the RMDRC feel a bit like an old cabinet of curiosities, with a desire to show off a great quantity and diversity of objects—in contrast to the current museum practice of calling carefully-picked specimens into the service of a grand idea. That said, I’m curious to see how the RMDRC handles themed exhibits like their newly opened Darwin and Dinosaurs, which was still being assembled during my visit.

In addition to the exhibits, there were a couple other aspects of the RMDRC that are worth a mention: First, the floor staff was extremely courteous, helpful, and informed (something I noticed even before I met Mike for the tour). Second, the Prehistoric Paradise gift shop was extremely spacious and well-stocked, something I’m always happy to see. And finally, in the time it’s taken me to get this post written up, I’m happy to see that Anthony Maltese has started posting a blog from the RMDRC paleo lab, so you can get a glimpse of the specimens they’re working on and other behind the scenes happenings at the Center.

• “Cave Man of Early Britain”, shown above, who seems quite a bit rougher around the edges than his rarified contemporary, l’Homme Neanderthal.
• A dramatically foreshortened moa.
• A Jurassic scene by early paleoartist Joseph Smit. Unsigned pieces that look like Smit’s work include this size comparison of a human, Diplodocus, and Gigantosaurus, and a couple of placid sauropods unperturbed by the kangaroo-hopping carnosaur (Laelaps?) entering from stage left.
• Paleolithic art authority Abbe Henri Breuil.
• Lots of AMNH exhibits and specimens:
  • Walter Granger and Barnum Brown alongside the AMNH Tenontosaurus.
  • Assembling the Anatotitan pair at the AMNH.
  • Working on the old Tyrannosaurus mount.
  • Cleaning a cast of the Styracosaurus skull.
  • The fossil of the gliding reptile Icarosaurus, before it flew the coop at the AMNH (and made its way back again).
  • A Placodus skeleton.
  • Dusting the Wilmette Meteorite.
• And this shot of teenager Tony Lessa sporting a Coelophysis on his ride.

• Several prime pelycosaur posts from recent field work in the Permian beds of Seymour, including Dimetrodon-as-chondrichthivore and new material that may be from the narrow-snouted finback Secodontosaurus .
• And a step-by-step look at how Julius T. Csotonyi recreated the world of Leonardo, the fantastically well-preserved Brachylophosaurus, for the museum’s Dinosaur Mummy CSI: Cretaceous Science Investigation exhibit. Csotonyi’s digital paintings are about the best I’ve seen, and this post gives valuable insight into his process.

The American Association of Museums crafts one definition to suit its purposes; Matt Celeskey abides by another.

Damn straight.

Photograph of John Thomas Scopes.
Taken the month before the Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial. June 1925
Photographer: Watson Davis

The Smithsonian Institution Archives has uploaded 39 restored and previously unpublished photos from the “Scopes Monkey Trial” to Flickr. From their summary:

Marcel C. LaFollette, an independent scholar, historian and Smithsonian volunteer uncovered these rare, previously unpublished photographs of the 1925 Tennessee vs. John Scopes “Monkey Trial” in the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). In 2005, SIA restored fifty-two of the negatives with funds granted by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee. Included here are thirty-nine of the images.

All photographs were taken by Watson Davis, Managing Editor of Science Service, while he was in Dayton, Tennessee, June 4-5, 1925, and July 10-22, 1925. LaFollette identified and dated each of these images, and has published a new book highlighting these and other images from the trial entitled, Reframing Scopes: Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the Century, University Press of Kansas, 2008.

Tip of the Toupee to Boing Boing.

A representative excerpt:

Museums don’t have a cheering section. As visitors walk through galleries, it’s easy to wonder: where does this stuff come from? Why is it here? Who cares? Museums do a decent job addressing the first two questions, but we rarely tackle the third. The use of an “objective” authoritative voice makes it hard for visitors to assign value or significance to items with which they don’t already have a connection.

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 post includes a couple of illustrations done for the hall: a rendering of the early mammal Adelobasileus by illustrator Mary Sundstrom, and my own painting of a large archosauriform known from a few dozen well-weathered fossils from the Middle Triassic of New Mexico. The restoration (shown above) is based largely on big erythrosuchian predators like Erythrosuchus and Shansisuchus (from South Africa and China, respectively).

This is the project I’ve been looking forward to working on since I started at the museum almost a decade ago, and finally all the pieces have come together to pull it off.  Everyone involved in the exhibit is itching to show off some the fantastic Triassic fossils from the museum collections. The article only hits some of the highlights: this photo shows a beautifully preserved young Coelophysis from the Museum’s Ghost Ranch block (read the article for more Coelophysis-as-cannibal news). Another picture shows a the beginnings of a life-sized model of a New Mexican erythrosuchian, while the final position of one of the big stars remains tastefully hidden until the opening.

I’m not certain how much I’ll be able to share here until the exhibit opens, but I’ll definitely pass along any info that’s been made public before then.