The thing about these extended silences is that they become harder to break the longer they linger. This half-year hiatus has given me ample opportunity to reflect upon various aspects of the site—what opportunities to pursue, what areas to focus on or shift away from, what to do with dated information, &c. &c. &c. I’m happy to say that after much deliberation every last paralyzing concern has met with multiple, contradictory sets of even more petrifying solutions.

In the end, to move forward, I’ll commit to no plans. For now, I’ll simply stop stopping, doing what I can when I can, without grand schemes or organizational aids, trusting that any necessary rhyme or reason will reveal itself in due course.

And so: time once again to dust off old bones, put fingers to keys and see where things go from here. To work!

• 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!

Albardi, L. 2004. Comparative aspects of the inner root sheath in adult and developing hairs of mammals in relation to the evolution of hairs. Journal of Anatomy 205: 3, pp. 179-200.

But, it seems well past time to work on putting some content up here, so I’ll fix as I go. If there are any long-suffering readers still out there, please let me know if anything isn’t working with the new design. Ideally, we’re all seeing something that looks a little like this (well, maybe somewhat larger):

More soon!

The upside is that I’m making more time during the normal workdays to paint. The downside is that I’m squeezing it in alongside several other duties that are coalescing around the same exhibit. Actually, that isn’t really a downside, since everything I’m working on is pretty exciting—the real downside is that it will be bleeding into more personal time as the holidays approach. Postings here may tend to be a bit sporadic over the next few weeks as a result.

In anticipation of this, I’ve bitten the bullet and ordered a long-overdue replacement to my aging computer. I’m hoping it will help me accomplish the tasks ahead at blazing speed, but I’m sure its main function will be to serve as a shiny bit of positive reinforcement when I need to hunker down and plug away at some image files or layouts.

Speaking of layouts, I’ve been threatening to redesign this site for a couple of months now, so I really should add that to the list of things that need my attention this month. When I last mentioned it, a couple of comments encouraged me to retire the Titanophoneus skull that has grinned out from the HMNH logo for the past three years, in favor of something a little more appropriately hairy. I haven’t quite settled on what will replace it just yet, but there are a couple of fruitful possibilities…

…so, just off the cuff, is there a kind reader out there able to send me a PDF of the following article?

Hopson & Kitching 2001. A probainognathian cynodont from South Africa and the phylogeny of non-mammalian cynodonts. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 156, p.5-35.

There are a slew of great paleo-stories floating around out there, and all signs point to more coming over the next month. If you’ve popped in here, chances are you’re already a regular reader of The Boneyard, which has, since my last post, fledged the last bit of its downy coat, spread its newly feathered wings, and left the nest where it was hatched over at Laelaps. It has found fertile hunting grounds at When Pigs Fly Returns and The Ethical Palaeontologist, and keep an eye out for a new edition at Fish Feet this weekend. Check it out for the latest and greatest paleontology on the web whilst I struggle mightily to get the Hairy Museum’s act together.

What am I hoping to accomplish here in the coming weeks? A brief list of plans:

• Wrapping up the final post in the Snyder Quarry installments, and at least one more story for the Triassophiles in the audience.
• More illustrations and sketches as I experiment with a subtle shift in the focus of the HMNH frontpage.
• Probably a few more weeks of highly sporadic posting, as I prepare to upgrade my aging computer and undertake a much needed redesign of the site (it seems well past time to turn the saffron-o-meter down a couple of notches).
• And stay tuned for at least one jaw-dropping recommendation for your autumnal reading pleasure and/or holiday wish list!

And while I’m mulling over a few new ideas for the site, it seems like a good time to solicit comments from any readers who keep checking in. Is there anything that you’d like to see more of (or just plain see) at the Hairy Museum? Any directions that the site should (or should not) take? Anything I could get rid of, or are there parts of the site I should leave up at all costs?

First up, a usable timeline. HMNH entries have been sorted by geologic time periods almost since the blog began, but they were never presented in any meaningful order or context. But now, everything is in the proper order, and we’ve got context coming out the wazoo! For example, pointing to the ‘Cretaceous’ link in the timeline will bring up a tooltip giving you the age of the Cretaceous Period, and clicking on it will load up every HMNH post about things that happened during that time.

The periods are nested, so that by clicking on the ‘Mesozoic’ link you can load up all entries in the ‘Triassic,’ ‘Jurassic,’ and ‘Cretaceous’ categories. And the colors are reasonable approximations of the hues specified by the Commission de la Carte Géologique du Monde for geologic maps and timelines. So it’s not just fruity, it’s international-standards-compliant!

Below the timeline is a table of categories arranged phylogenetically, or by evolutionary relationship. Right now it’s just the chordates—yes, there are a few invertebrate posts floating around, but for now this is a good start. These categories are also nested: selecting ‘Bony Fish,’ for instance, will load up every post on fish, tetrapods, reptiles, birds, and mammals. (For why this is so, look here.) As far as I know, there’s no international body specifying colors for taxonomic groups, so I just went with my aesthetic judgement on this one.

Feel free to poke through the new organization and see how it works. If anything seems unusual/erroneous/broken, or if you have any thoughts on how it could be made better, by all means leave a comment or send me an email. Enjoy your visit!

…at least for now. Poking through the site’s underlying code has inspired me to begin working on that clutter of categories over in the left-hand column. While that is going on, don’t be surprised if all the archived posts suddenly lose whatever marginal context they once had. I assure you, it will only be temporary, and with luck, things will be a little better organized soon!

• Surprisingly, this appears to be the 100th post! Nice bit of coincidence there.
• We’ve added three new galleries—my Permocarboniferous Sketchbook and Monkey-Lizards of the Triassic, and Ray Troll sang The Devonian Blues in his Hall of Ich-Theology.
• The Library hasn’t expanded much. I transcribed Henry Fairfield Osborn’s original description of Tyrannosaurus rex in honor of the dinosaur’s 100th birthday, but not long afterwards the American Museum generously made the original paper (along with many of their other scientific publications) freely available for download. Perhaps the HMNH Library should shift focus and start compiling links to similar resources…
• The only change to the Paleo-Pop Shop is that my stock in Coelophysis Madonna T-shirts has dwindled to the point that I really should start working on some new Hairy Museum merchandise. Any suggestions?

Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of this little experiment is that, in the past year, visitation to the Hairy Museum has increased sixfold. I’d like to pass along my sincerest thanks to all the new visitors for stopping by, the longtime patrons for coming back, and to everyone who alerted me to a story, sent some words of encouragement, or found something in this frazzled little corner of the web worth linking to. Thank you.

On to year two!

Personal trichology aside, this study rates an HMNH seal of approval strictly for the dramatic before-and-after pictures of hairless to fuzzy mice.