fossil of the weekend #88

the amazingly complete skeleton of the fresh water skate Myledaphus, part of the royal tyrrell museum's 25th anniversary display "alberta unearthed".

fossil of the weekend #76

a fossil salmon, THE modern fish of british columbia (well their not fossils these days :P). like the peanut brained fool i am, i forgot to write down the exact identity of this (or any of the other fossils i saw at the royal british columiba museum)... so that's all i can tell you.

the post on the royal british columbia museum coming soon (for real this time!)

fossil of the weekend! #66

stupid innerweb! i had this post all set to go up for this weekend... as i was going to be busy with the first OH-lympic event (working on the post as we speak!). here was what you should have gotten this weekend...


a cast of the cool transitional Tiktaalik, not a fish but not quite an amphibian. a "missing link" if you will, not that that term is used anymore... as this guy probably isn't directly related to amphibians but rather an off shot from the lineage. yet he still gives us an insight into what this transitionary form sort of looked like!

fossil of the weekend! #48

a skeleton of a Micropycnodon from the collections of the royal tyrrell museum.

fossil of the weekend! #15

the skull of the placoderm (armoured fish) dunkleosteus at the royal tyrrell museum.

the royal tyrrell museum

now that i'm back in canada, and specifically drumheller it only made sense that i would return to my former home AND workplace. the royal tyrrell museum.

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now of course i've talked a lot about this museum here on my blog, but as i didn't really start this blog till after i'd left the museum i haven't posted much about it (and when i did in those early blogging times i didn't cover it well). so i'm going to fix this lack of tyrrell info on my blog with this the definitive traumador guide to the museum!

so in the words of the museum's spokesman john acron (i've met him before!) "welcome to the royal tyrrell museum" though of course "this is not the museum it is merely the sign!"

now of course you want to know more about the museum as opposed to the sign so...

the museum to start off with, is located within midland provincal park, and thus technically makes it just "outside" of drumheller. it is halfway along the north dinosaur trail (the trail being two roads that run east/west one on each side of the red deer river valley on which most of the valley's tourist attractions are located). it is either a 5 minute car drive or an hour walk from downtown drumheller.

the royal tyrrell museum of palaeontology is the only major museum in all of canada dedicated to just the science of palaeontology. the museum's slogan "celebrating life" summarizes this topic perfectly, if you ask me.

the museum opened in 1985 as just the plain old tyrrell museum of palaeontology. however 10 years later in 1995 due to the museum's important work and increasing reputation the queen of england gave it her approval, and it gained the royal on the front of its name.

being run and operated by the government of alberta the tyrrell runs on a philosophy of preserving, protecting, and presenting the fossils of the province for albertans now and forever to enjoy. due to museum's specialization in palaeontology it is headquarters for a lot of the fossil management in the province. if you want to dig in alberta you'll need to apply to the museum for the permit (though if you don't have a PHD you most likely won't get it... trust me i've tried!).

to help it with its mission of preserving, protecting, and presenting the museum has a whole army of palaeontologists in its employ. just like my buddy dr. françois therrien here.

each one has a different interest and speciality so that the museum can study and present as much of the science as possible without too much overlap. these palaeontologists function as curators, whose job is to direct and supervise the collection, research, and presentation of fossils in their field of study. its an important job (and one i some day hope to get!).

when i left the museum it had 6 curators, but in response to some really sad deaths and just ordinary staff changes the museum now has 7. a few of whom i've never met...

well in order to preserve, protect, and present anything the tyrrell of course must collect fossils. with its crew of very talented and dedicated technicians, like fossil hunter extraordinaire and all round nice guy darren tanke above, the museum is very good at collecting them.

the tyrrell actively excavates (that's the biz term for digging/collecting) fossils from dozens and dozens of sites all over alberta that yield everything from dinosaurs, to marine reptiles, ice age mammals, fossil pollen, placoderm fish, and various invertebrates. however they have collected many times outside the province as close as BC and as far away as china and even antarctica!

so how do you preserve and protect fossils. well the number one favour you can do the fossils, so they stick around, is to get them out of the damaging elements. pretty much everything nature does from raining, snowing, being sunny, or windy damages fossils. if they are left outside in the elements these remains of the deep past would erode into nothing more than dust. instead the museum brings them back to the museum (or sometimes one of a couple warehouses it has) and stores them in the unprepared collections.

as john acron funnily puts it "and why are they unprepared you might ask? i mean hey, these fossils have been around for millions of years you think if they were going to be prepared for something, they would be by now!". of course unprepared means that the fossils have only been worked on by people enough to safely get them out of the ground. they typical need more work to be fully seen and studied. the process by which we clean them off is called preparation.

like all good museums the tyrrell has a huge back log of unprepared specimens. the majority these were collected in the 80's, 90's, and 2000's, but a fun game to play in the unprepared collections, as they're all labelled, is finding the oldest jacket! . the oldest i could find was from 1937, and there many others of dates between this and 1985.

in order to get these fossils prepared the tyrrell has state of the art fossil preparation labs and facilities. here the techicans, like my friends david and dawna here, patiently and carefully work on cleaning off and repairing these fossils so they can be looked at and studied.

when it comes to the protection directive, this is the place to go. the prepared collections area. once a fossil is cleaned off (prepared) it comes here to be stored. this is more than just a big warehouse where things are dumped though (unprepared collections is more like that). this is more like a big library of fossils...

every specimen is given a number, and is stored in an appropriate section of the collection. all the fossils are catalogued in huge books that include information like where the specimen was found, who found it, who prepared it, and even which scientific literature it is mentioned in.

over 200 000 fossils are catalogued in the collection, of which over 93 000 are dinosaurs. this makes it the largest fossil collection in canada, and one of the larger collections throughout the world. nearly a hundred scientists visit the museum every year to look and and study the fossils in these collections (and it can be way more when the museum is hosting a big gathering of scientists like a conference or synposium!).

the tyrrell however is much more famous for the last of its three directives, and that is the presenting. the museum boasts world class fossil exhibits open to the public all year round. so world class that many other museums have visited it to get ideas for their own displays. i'll be taking you on a virtual tour of these shortly...

over 300 000 visitors check out the museum each year, and about 200 000 of these come during the summer season. i remember this crazy stretch of 3 months well!

rounding off the presentation side of things the museum has cutting edge education and interpretation programs and services. these range from knowledgeable staff (and some dinosaurs ;p ) on the museum floor to answer guests' immediate questions, to tours and hikes, school programs, and even a full on summer camp!

i used to work in this portion of the museum for the most part when i worked here. being everything from a dinosaur on the gallery floor to a expert guest at the badlands science camp i got around presenting (even with my brain if i got it wrong a lot!).

so that in a nutshell is the museums overall structure and battleplan. now to take you on a quick virtual tour of the museum. some of this stuff is new, and i hadn't seen it till this recent trip. so it just goes to show much like the prehistoric life it it presents within the museum is evolving itself.

Cretaceous Alberta

the entrance to the museum galleries is brand new. back in my day it was a giant globe floating in space. now it is a much more impressive recreation of alberta 70 million years ago. here you will encounter a pack of albertosaurs wandering through a dried up riverbed.

i'd run into the albertosaurs before when i briefly tried to get my job back in the xmas of 06.

whats really cool about this new display, beyond the fact its cool pretending to walk back in time, is that it is self interpreting. meaning there's no signs to tell you what you're looking at or more to the point where and what to look at in the first place. it is just as if you travelled back in time and can explore it on your own.

so for example you have to both notice the scars on the snout of this running albertosaur, and figure out possible causes for them on your own.

right down to minor but amazing details like all these replica fish, turtles, and invertabrates in a small pond.

there's all sorts of other things to spot and think about, but i'll leave that till a later post or for you to see yourself when you visit the museum.

Great Minds Fresh Finds

next up is this display, which not only showcases the curators of the museum, but also their current work. its a really nice setup, and if you're not familiar with the scientists of the museum its a great way to get to know what their up to.

its also the area where any tyrrell fossils recently in the news are put on display. such as this eggnant adocus turtle (that's my new word for pregnant with eggs... i hope it catches on!) which you may have heard about a couple months ago or read about on the blogs.

needless to say the whole great minds fresh finds area has changed a lot since the last time i was here. what with new research in the past 2 years, and some new curators starting on since than.

Lords of the Land

another sort of new, but yet not really, area is the lords of the land. it used to be called the theropod hall and showcased meat eating dinosaurs from around the world. now they've replaced all the foreign theropods with alberta ones, and redecorated and re lite the exhibit so it looks like an art gallery.

it looks really nice and artsy, but at the same time is an extreme case of what i call "museum lighting". it looks real nice when you're there, but you can't really take pictures. worse the lighting directs and dictates what and how you see the specimen. it takes the exploration out of the museum visit and it tells you what to see, and i think that kinda takes the fun out of it.

the show case piece of this hall is still the mounted tyrannosaurus rex in the centre of the display. it is one of two tyrannosaurs the tyrrell boasts... of course the other t-rex is a little more signficant to me. that being my mother the huxley tyrannosaur.

next you hit the "main" galleries of the tyrrell which are fossil halls setup as though you were travelling from the beginning of life towards the present. so the first place you'd end up on such a time journey would be...

The Burgess Shale

one of the tyrrell's coolest displays has to be its burgess shale recreation. here you travel through a magnified scene of the cambrian as though it were in a fish tank (the animals are 12 times their original size as otherwise you won't see most of them well). it even has a glass floor that allows you to look at the ocean floor your walking above.

the only problem with it is that it doesn't photograph well as you can see. so be sure to visit just for this exhibit. there isn't another burgess shale display this cool i've ever heard of!

there is also a nice interpretive section on the burgess shale, and the tyrrell's efforts in the 1990's to find other sites around field with the same critters.

it also has a huge selection and display of burgess critters. which was cool to have when i was first reading wonderful life. i could just run up stairs from where i was reading and look at the stuff. not that i want to rub it in. it just made the book that much cooler!

Devonian Reef

next we jump to the devonian and one of the reefs that ties into alberta's rich oil deposits. here you get an awesome fish tank style recreation of the time period. i think this is where my love of aquarium began, growing up and watching this reef. which tells you how cool it is. nothing in it is alive or moving, yet it could captivate me for hours, and i have a real short attention span most of the time people of the innerweb!

Onto the Land

the first display you hit coming down stairs is the highlights of life's conquest of the land. its a cool display that shows you the progress from the first tiny plants to make it onto land all the way to amphibans emerging into a fully developed terristial ecosystem.

Permian Hall

next we come to the biggest extinction in the earth's history. despite alberta not really having much fossil material from this time, using casts from elsewhere in the world the tyrrell shows off this time period well.

among my favourite is the wall of skulls of the bizarre and diverse reptiles and sort of reptiles that are from this era. if you think dinosaurs had the monopoly on weird, one look at this wall should hopefully fix your opinion. mind you in this pic dimetrodon isn't one of the weirdos. all around him are some though. my photos of them didn't turn out so well sadly :(

speaking of dimetrodon what permian display won't be complete without everyone's favourite not a dinosaur. emphasis on the display is made that this is not a dinosaur, but rather the apex predator of another time, and an ancestor to you mammals!

Cretaceous Garden

immediately after the permian display, is a tucked away entrance to the most often missed part of the tyrrell, the cretaceous garden. seriously now that you've been warned watch for it! the gallery staff get the question of where the garden is seriously hundreds of times a day.

this is a special living collection of plants whose decsendents were alive in alberta during the cretaceous.

it is a special place to me as for 2 years of my life this was my home! i lived here for most of my time in drumheller, and all of my time after getting my job at the tyrrell (immediately after being hired i was kinda kicked out of dan and craig's apartment and this is where the museum put me up).

Triassic Giant

my favourite of the new things added since my departure was the triassic giant. ever since the death of marine reptiles curator betsy nicholls in 2004, her greatest work has sat in the museum collections unseen by the public. finally in this tribute display, her magnificant shonisaurus sikanniensis the largest marine reptile known, is out for all to see!

i'll be blogging about this huge ichthyosaur later...

Dinosaur Hall

of course the main attraction of the museum for most is the dinosaur hall. one of the largest in the world with over 30 dinosaur skeletons on display in one hall, and most of which are mounted in life like positions.

my only complaint is that the hall is ALMOST presented in chronologic order. except there are NO triassic dinosaurs present, and that it goes from the late jurassic straight to the late cretaceous. i know this is mostly due to the museum in its beginning setting up a trade for some jurassic dinosaur casts in exchange for an albertosaur and some duckbills with an american museum. besides these jurassic dinosaurs all the major skeletons are those of albertan dinosaurs.

this is in some way a minor complaint from a real dinosaur stickler... can you blame me. i am one afterall!

no the dinosaur hall is pretty fantastic.

it has a representative of every major clade of dinosaur except prosauropod and hypsilophodontid (though the theropods are pretty coelurosaur centric... partial due to alberta's theropods all being coelurosaurs, and also the pack of the primordial feather pushing for this)

it definately is worth the visit for any of you dinosaur buffs out there on the innerweb!

Ceratopsians

one of the new displays that i'm not entirely keen on (just because it resulted in the firing of the girl of my dreams lillian the albertosaur) is the new ceratopsian exhibit. again i did say not entirely. for the most part i think it is rather cool. other than the drab colours they used. it makes them seem boring...

which dinner shouldn't be if you ask me. man i could go for a ceratopsian burger right about now.

here you'll find many of the new horned dinosaurs that have been in the news lately. such as eotriceratops pictured here. there are several other, but i'll blog about these in a bit.

also there is the new ubber cool yet to be formally described or named "dinosaur park pachyrhinosaur".

Bearpaw Sea

next we come to a childhood favourite of mine. the marine reptiles of the ancient interior seaway. here you get to see some of the amazing animals that lived along side the dinosaurs.

when i was a hatchling craig would bring me in here to lull me to sleep. so i have very fond memories of here.

KT Extinction

the last bit of the dinosaur hall covers the very upseting demise of my kind. in fact for me this section is just an emotional rollercoaster because not only is it the sad story of the end of the dinosaurs, but my mother is on display here. i haven't been able to talk to her in 2 years...

Mammal Hall

from here you hit the often skipped or quickly run through age of mammals. after all the amazing displays before it, visitors and staff often wear out and just breeze through here.

not that i blame them. i find mammals kinda boring myself. though to be fair if you take the time to explore these displays their actually pretty good.

Ice Age

the one exception to the skipped mammals is the ice age exhibit, with a mammoth under attack by saber toothed cats. people love this one, and it is one of the most photographed parts of the museum!

sadly after this you've caught up to the present era, and thus the end of the museum and you end up in the gift shop.

so i hope you've enjoyed your virtual tour of the royal tyrrell museum. again i couldn't possible do it any justice here on the web wide world, and you really should visit it anyway.

do stay tuned to my blog for the next little while as i'll be doing more posts as i visit around here.

to see some of my older posts on the museum click here.

the canterbury museum (museum quest part 15) (christchurch part 2)

Location: Christchurch

Baskets Left: 3

okay so having killed last night watching a game of rug-bee time to get back to the task of getting rid of these ancient maori baskets (which just happen to contain all the mystic knowledge of the maori people!) for my boss ms. rhonwyn . i just hope that the maori god of darkness whirodoesn't manage to catch up with me again!

i my next appointed stop was the canterbury museum located just off christchurch's town square.

christchurch is a very flay city. it reminds me of red deer alberta and to be frank people of the web wide world i'm not a big fan of really flat places....


though town square christchurch was alright. it had some real nice buildings, and trams running all around it.

it also had some nice fountains i couldn't help but notice (i do LOVE a good fountain... with all that moving trickling water!). this was one of my favs. a wall of moving water. simple in concept, but sometimes it does the trick... like in this case.

the museum was located on the edge of the christchurch botanic garden. sadly due to my foolishness earlier i no longer had the leisure of wasting time to check out the sights. it would have been nice to compare this botanic garden to the one i live in back in dunedin.

far what i gathered here on the edge this one was a lot more flat, and as of such boring...

though it did have a way fancier fountain! i guess if you can't out do them in one way you find another. so i would say to those planning on hitting new zealand's botanic gardens dunedin's terrain is more exciting christchurch has better fountains...

the museum building itself was almost a dead ringer for one from the university of otago . which i have not had the best experience with to be fair.

still an assignment is an assignment, and given what i've seen of the stakes so far i'm not about to put off fulfilling it. that and i'd like to stay in ms. rhonwyn's good books.

the first thing this museum had was moas. their right in the front entrance. making it not too shabby an intro for someone into the prehistoric and extinct such as myself...

the moas were very nice specimens, and mounted very well in a great display. in fact i liked their display area better than the otago's. these ones had a better backdrop and lighting increasing your appreciation of both the completeness of the skeletons, and also making them just plain easier to see!

they also had some nice follow up displays highlighting the size difference in moas (you'll note the small Megalapteryx didinus beside the foot of the giant Dinornis robustus), and also a moa egg.

you than wander into the maori gallery which has a top notch collection of tools.

they also have a large number of carvings and artifacts from the south islands iwi or tribes.

they also have a sweet display of maori green stone tools and carvings. it's one of the best i've seen so far (as every museum has to have a display on these done here).

i'm really starting to like the little tiki carvings that were really common for the maori to make. wonder what their all about?

sadly no time to find out. i needed to cover as much ground in as little time as i could. the only way to stay not being hunted is to keep moving. so that's what i did.

next came the settlers display. i to say this beats both the otago museums section of the same nature, and the whole otago settlers museum (both are so boring i haven't bothered to waste time posting about them... to be fair though i'm not usually the most keen on human stuff).

this one though had cool glass tubes around the displays. the lighting and ambiance were top notch too. making for an all round interesting gallery...

they also had some cool chinese stuff in a chinatown display. i've always wanted to goto china or the land of dragons (dragons often being dinosaurs over there!).

next came a real surprise! i apparently stepped through a time portal right into 1890's christchurch!!!

okay, so it turns out it was a mock up of the old town... in my defence you'd have thought you'd walked into a time portal too considering how good the mock up town was!!!

throughout the town you could wander into the various buildings and check out cool displays and artifacts related to the building you entered.

my fav was the old version of the museum! it had animals put up in that classic, and kinda creepy, old skool european style.

speaking of critters up in museums next came the natural history hall. these guys weren't up in quite as old or creepy fashion...

they had a whole hall of birds. which makes sense as new zealand is the land of birds!

who knew there were so many types too?

there was a whole case full of DIFFERENT types of kiwi for crying out loud!!!

one of my favs was the roof full of different albatrosses. the biggest of which i'd already seen in real life on this trip!

finally i got to the big attraction for me. the geology hall. complete with giant globe greeting you at its entrance. i swear this is a motif of geology displays everywhere. even the vancouver eco centre had one (as did of course the tyrrell)!

the highlight of the rock only section of the displays was an ACTUAL meteorite!!! way too cool!

then we got to what i wanted to see. the fossil section...

including a very impressive wall of fossil crabs.

continuing with the underwater theme a really nice cast of xiphactinus (this one was from kansas somewhere). as much as i think these cretaceous fish are cool i wouldn't want to swim with one!

than there was my favourite display in the canterbury (at least as a straight up museum display... as you'll see soon).

a display of the south islands marine reptiles. i have a bit of a soft spot for marine reptiles. not only are they from the water which is way cool (i just wish we theropods had evolved more than basic swimming skills... probably marine reps fault we didn't come to think of it... anyways as i'm not a big on water critter if find the ones that are really interesting).

back at the royal tyrrell museum i used to hang out in the bearpaw sea exhibit with our marine reptiles a lot. it used to calm me down... though i guess i have to admit the idea of a living non fossil mosasaur scares me

the display was of a mosasaur skull and a elasmosaur torso.

a nice little statue showed the suspected interaction of these two animals in life. they weren't always doing this in life mind you... only when the mosasaur was hungry ;p

the elasmosaur on display was a Mauisaurus haasti named after the maori demi god accredited with raising the north island out of the ocean.

the impressive predator jaws belonged to Prognathodon waiparaensis a unique new zealand mosasaur. this one is among the most complete mosasaur skulls from new zealand. so it was cool to get to see them!

though it's a good thing their not on a living one!

than came part of the exhibit that made me nearly faint!...

DINOSAURS!?!?!?!?!

remember over a year ago when i was looking to move to place where there were no other dinosaurs... and i picked the south island because it meet those criteria... i guess i was wrong... well sort of.

immediately i caught onto the fact these weren't locals (kinda hard to be frankly as there are NO local south island dinos!). they were in fact from MY neck of the woods!

a triceratops found everywhere from the dakotas, to montana, saskatchewan, and of course alberta. with it an edmontosaur... how much more alberta do you get than the edmonton lizard? (granted its named after a rock formation named after the provinces capital city not after the actual city itself...)

i was both mystified and miffed by this unexpected, and frankly slightly horrifying discovery...

had i come to new zealand in vein? were other dinosaurs having the clever idea of avoiding the overcrowding and coming down here too? was new zealand about to be overrun with dinosaurs too?

eventually i calmed down. these were just fossil dinosaurs. not living ones like me. it's the living ones that have been causing me problems lately...

okay so technically their other dinosaurs, but their not like me. i'm still special in being the only LIVING dinosaur on the south island (other than when larry visited me). that and these guys are up here in christchurch, and not in dunedin. making me still the ONLY dinosaur in dunedin at least.

all this long hard thinking with my tiny brain must have burnt up a lot of energy. suddenly i was hungry as...

suddenly a definate up of these two ornithischians being here occurred to me!

oh man YUMMY! i haven't had a proper t-rex meal in over a year... i love hadrosaurs for lunch...

but if i love duckbill than i am head over heel for...

TRICERATOPS! (a historic fav of my people, and something even my dislike for most rexian conduct can not overcome...)

oh yeah, that hit the spot. i haven't had a good triceratops since i was in vancouver. come to think of it though i haven't had a fossilized one since BEFORE i was fired from the tyrrell (man that was a long time ago now!).

okay so the canterbury museum's food selection is second to none... at least for you theropods reading out there... my two favourite food types within cms of each other. it doesn't get much better than this!

of course as is the case in my life every up seems to be followed by a massive down...

just around the corner was another theropod. an allosaurus to be specific.

now we theropods don't get along at the best of times, but if there were a rivalry between us in the MODERN era it is between us t-rexs and allosaurs (the reason i say modern times we were seperated from each other in the mezesoic by about 110 million years!).


immediately i got a vibe of dislike from this skeleton...

you see fossilized dinosaurs (like my mom) may be able to communicate with us living dinosaurs (most humans don't seem to notice their communication efforts at all), but they are only shadows of their former selves. their more emotion than actual presence, and if they do manage to talk it's an echo of when they were alive...

my mom for example has only really said one thing to me ever... oh wait, sorry way off tangent...

this guy was giving off both the not liking other theropods on his turf and more to the point not liking a t-rex being that theropod.

you see throughout the 20th century tyrannosaurs and allosaurs were competing with each other to stay in the public's eye. as both the pinnacle predators of our time, and massive meat eaters compared to modern mammal predators (minus the whales mind you) it was easy to keep people interested in us. the problem was which was the more popular.

after all if you're number one dinosaurian predator than you get to make demands, and get back some control as an extinct critter in this world of humans. if you're stuck at number two well than your out of luck...

of course our battle for apex theropod kinda became null for poor allosaurus the instant it was pointed out that spinosaurus (the fish eater that it is) was bigger than t-rex. than followed up shortly by the discovery of massive south american allosaurian relative giganotosaurus (plus recently many of his other relatives in the carcharodontosaurid)... come to think of it i wonder if mike has found anything more out about the supposed "cold war" between the coelurosaurs and the carcharodontosaurids the modern incarnation of this popularity contest...

right sorry my peanut sized mind seems to have been a little scattered by this dinosaur encounter.

finally the allosaur's faint distant echoed voice could be heard. "enemy... leave!"

i wasn't in the mood to argue with a poor 155 million year dead guy in his place...

i left slightly depressed. the encounter reminded me of why i left drumheller over a year ago. more to the point i was bummed out by the sudden appearance of dinosaurs on the south island.

was it enough for me that i was the only dinosaur in dunedin... or did i need the whole giant island to myself?

adding to my sense of defeat was that as i started to leave the museum all 3 baskets were still in my pocket... i was going to have to move on in my museum quest, and i was still no closer to figuring out what made these kete o te wananga disappear.

to be continued...