Hairy Museum of Natural History

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.

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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.

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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)

Well, folks, it looks like the month of December is going to be hairier than usual around HMNH HQ. At the top of the list are some thrilling but time-consuming deadlines from the day job rushing towards me, including a set of illustrations for a new exhibit opening this spring, but needed by January in order to flesh out a little publication that has to be printed and ready to distribute by opening day. Sorry to be so tight-lipped about this project, but there should be more to say very 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.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Rogaine, The Day Job.

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That’s New Mexico Friends of Paleontology, not the Fraternal Order of Police. This Monday night at 7:00pm, I’ll be giving a little presentation for the October meeting of the NM Friends of Paleontology. I think the title of the talk is going to be “An Artist’s view of the Triassic,” but I may have to pull a last minute switch and call it “Sketches of the Triassic” since, as usual, I haven’t got as many polished pieces together as I would have liked.

Still, I’ve got a good handful of concept drawings, preliminary studies, and works in progress that should provide a sneak peek at some of the exciting goings-on in the Exhibits Department at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. The New Mexico Friends of Paleo. meetings are free and open to the public, so if there are any interested readers in the Albuquerque area, feel free to pop in on Monday!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia, Paleo-Pop, The Day Job, Triassic.

Comments on record: (2)