Hairy Museum of Natural History

In this case, mine appears to be a Triassic coelacanth:

This was the scene at The Day Job a couple of weeks back, as we unpacked a sculpture for the newly-opened Triassic exhibit. I happened to be wearing the right shirt for the occasion, and my boss David snapped this picture. The piece I’m holding is a fantastic restoration of the freshwater coelacanth, Chinlea sorenseni, about to snap up a school of Synorichthyes. The fish were sculpted by the talented Gary Staab of Staab Studios for the exhibit.

And here’s how the sculpture looks on display, beneath a cast of an fossil Chinlea skull and some Triassic coelacanth bits from New Mexico. The panel is sandwiched between a petrified lungfish burrow and the reconstructed leaves of the enigmatic plant Sanmiguelia. A reflection from the fishtank of Kirby, a living African lungfish, can be seen in the window:

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Bony Fish, The Day Job, Triassic.

Comments on record: (2)

Today’s the day! Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Triassic New Mexico opens at 9:00 sharp at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. I (and many other talented staff, volunteers, and contractors) have been working on this exhibit for a couple of years now, and I’m proud (and more than a little exhausted) to say that everyone’s hard work came together beautifully this past week.

I’ll be at the museum for an exhibit poster signing from 9:00 to noon, so if you’re in the vicinity, stop by and say hi.

If you aren’t anywhere near Albuquerque, there’s still a portion of the exhibit tailor-made for you. There hasn’t been any press on this yet, but if you swing by nmstatefossil.org and poke around, you’ll find a wealth of information on New Mexico’s most famous fossil resident, the little dinosaur Coelophysis. The NMMNHS has gotten permission from several authors, publishers, and other museums to distribute much of the primary literature on this Triassic theropod, so digging deep into the site will allow you to access a couple dozen PDFs of technical and popular articles.

The site was put together by Ideum, a fantastic group of interactive developers in Corrales, NM. They also worked with us on an in-hall interactive to interpret our two-ton Coelophysis block from Ghost Ranch:

The touchscreen display features a drag-and-zoom viewer that allows visitors to get a detailed look at the block, a series of highlighted features that can be toggled on and off, video segments of the block’s preparator explaining the features in detail, and an overlay showing the death positions of 7 of the more complete Coelophysis preserved in the block. More info about the interactives can be seen at Ideum’s blog and portfolio site.

And some quick pictures from before I dash out the door:

The skulls of Triassic amphibians. Clockwise from the top: Eocyclotosaurus (cast), Hadrokkosaurus (cast), juvenile and adult Buettneria (fossil), and Mastodonsaurus (cast).

A touchable bonded-bronze cast of the aetosaur Typothorax coccinarum.

Phytosaur skulls (Pseudopalatus buceros) from the Snyder Quarry near Ghost Ranch.

The tiny braincase of the earliest-known mammal, Adelobasileus cromptoni.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: The Day Job, Triassic.

Comments on record: (8)

• 
• A quick vector sketch of the head of
  Raeticodactylus filisurensis

• New pterosaur: Raeticodactylus filisurensis
• Name means: (Wing) Finger from the village of Filisur, in Raetia (the old name for the Swiss Canton Grisons, where it was found)
• Relations: Basal pterosaur
• Location: Eastern Switzerland
• Age: Late Triassic, ~203,000,000 years ago
• Material: Nearly complete skull, partial postcrania
• Wingspan: 135cm (~4.5 feet)
• Info: The oldest known pterosaur fossils come from late in the Triassic period, when this finger-winged group of reptiles first took to the skies. Newly-described Raeticodactylus adds to the handful of currently known Triassic pterosaurs. Raeticodactylus sported a unique crest above its nose, a deeply-keeled lower jaw, and a unique combination of teeth—fangs at the front of its mouth with wrinkled enamel on the inside, and crunching teeth further back in its jaws tipped with three to five cusps. Its limbs were long and thin compared to its contemporaries, giving it about twice the wingspan of the most famous Triassic pterosaur, Eudimorphodon ranzii. And, oddly enough, the head of its femur is offset 90° from the shaft, suggesting an upright stance more similar to that of dinosaurs than other pterosaurs.
• Reference: Stecher, R. 2008. A new Triassic pterosaur from Switzerland (Central Austroalpine, Grisons), Raeticodactylus filisurensis gen. et sp. nov. Swiss Journal of Geosciences doi: 10.1007/s00015-008-1252-6.
• Web coverage:
  • Laelaps
  • When Pigs Fly Returns 1 & 2
  • David Hone’s Blog
  • microecos

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Recent Discoveries, Reptiles, Triassic.

Comments on record: (4)

A little more news on the upcoming Triassic exhibit at the day job—Discovery News writer Larry O’Hanlon met with the NMMNHS Triassic Team last week, and has posted a teaser article up on his blog, Earth Impacts, with the promise of more to come.

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).

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia, The Day Job, Triassic.

Comments on record: (4)

The Albuquerque Tribune ran a story today on the project that’s been keeping me busy at the day job: a new Triassic Exhibit opening this March at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

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.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia, The Day Job, Triassic.

Comments on record: (9)