Hairy Museum of Natural History

I’m a bit of a sucker for “paleo-artist makes good” stories, and today’s New York Times has a great example in this profile of Viktor Deak, whose reconstructions of extinct hominids are on display at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins. The story includes some nice multimedia details, including a video interview with Mr. Deak, a bit about him on today’s Science Podcast, and a panoramic tour of his studio that’s enough to give any paleophile serious workspace envy.

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

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Hominids, Museumabilia, Paleo-Pop.

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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.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Hominids, Neogene, Webbery.

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