Beijing Aquarium

Beijing is actually home to three public aquariums, but the one I’m covering here is actually inside the Beijing Zoo, though it can be visited separately hence the separate review. It’s also big enough in its own right to warrant a separate review since it can easily occupy three or four hours of your time. It’s rather new having been open only since 2003 I believe.

Bristol Zoo

The zoo in Bristol has gone through a number of names in its distinguished history (first opening in 1836) and is currently the ‘Bristol Zoo Gardens’ though for a long time it was the last surviving ‘zoological and botanical gardens’ in the UK, and quite possibly the world. In fact thanks to its age it has a long-standing minor disagreement over its position as the ‘oldest’ modern zoo since while London Zoo first opened its doors in 1828 it was not until 1847 that it opened them to the general public and not just the member of the Royal Zoological Society and thus either predates Bristol by 8 years, or is 11 years younger.

In any case, both are important historical collections that have survived and even thrived in the modern era. Bristol Zoo is small and self contained close to the city centre but nevertheless manages to cram in a great deal and uses the limited space very well. Like London, they have moved away from large animals (elephants, rhino, giraffe etc.) so that despite the small size of the zoo, the enclosures themselves are roomy. Despite its age Bristol is one of the most modern zoos in Europe with almost every major building being either new or recently renovated and the collections as a result are very nice.

Casts vs sculptures

A long time ago in the dim and distant past on here I wrote about fossil chimeras and mounting skeletons and have since written about fake fossils of various kinds. In these I rather breezed over some of the different ways that fossils can be produced for display and it seems worth going over in a little greater detail and roughly defining a few terms to make things easier for people to understand and distinguish between the various things out there.

Increasingly, genuine fossils of large animals are not on display in museums. These are expensive and valuable artefacts and scientists need to access them, and the museums need to protect them. Big dinosaur mounts that tower into the air made up of original fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old are therefore rare. They are hard to examine, and difficult to keep clean and if they ever fell over…. However, even the most complete of big dinosaur mounts are often not as they seem and can be completed using a number of different techniques.

Here then are the ways that you can complete your dinosaur fossil:

1. Original material. While these are becoming rarer, there are a significant number of mounted skeletons being produced composed mostly or entirely of original fossil material. Since there are pretty much no *totally* complete dinosaur skeletons in 3-D, the odd part of another specimen may be used to fill in the gaps, effectively creating a chimera.

2. Repaired material. Even if you do have a complete specimen, the odds are there are a few chunks missing – a humerus with the end gone, teeth lost from the jaws, or the neural spines broken from a few vertebrae. These can still be used with the missing parts repaired and completed from plaster or a similar material.

3. Casts. You can of curse simply make a direct physical copy of the bones of your specimen and mount them, or from another specimen to fill in the gaps and these are casts. Most big specimens nowadays are casts of real specimens supplemented by sculptures of missing bits.

4. Sculptures. Finally, you can simply model the missing pieces from scratch and make them to fit the gaps and what you know of the existing anatomy or from close relatives. Sculptured bones run the full length from inept plasticine-like creations that look only vaguely like bones right through to superb ones that can even look better (since they have no breaks or distortions) than the originals.

A selection of casts and sculptures of dinosaur claws and various teeth.

Telling these different ‘bones’ apart is not normally too difficult with a little practice (though across a darkened dinosaur hall it’s not always easy). Typically original material looks organic in a way that even casts do not – natural swells and breaks and just the texture of the bones will look ‘right’. Repairs to original material are often crude, but in any case the instant change in texture and colour between a sculpted piece of plaster and the bone itself should be clear. Sculptures (whether as repairs or as whole replacement bones) often have little texture on their surface beyond a few scratches or dimples and are often a give away as their surface is so smooth. Finally casts often loose a little of the detailed surface texture of the originals from which they are copied but can usually be distinguished by their colours. Real bones generally have a range of colours (if minor) to them when casts are typically made using coloured resin or are pained after production and so are a uniform colour.

That’s quite probably more than enough of casts and sculptures, but this should serve as a guide to what is, and is not, real in museums and how to tell them apart and why this can be important.

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Beijing Zoo Too

I do actually now have a *lot* of photos of the Beijing zoo, so given that I’m unlikely to find a useful forum for many outside the zoo review I though I should just stick them up here while it’s vaguely relevant. Photos again by myself and Roger Close.

Beijing Zoo

Given the raft of zoo reviews on here of late it’s remiss of me not to have covered the Beijing zoo since not only is it actually quite good, but I have been probably half a dozen times in the last year and it’s opposite the IVPP. One partial reason was a lack of good photos (although a few have turned up on here from time to time such as bustards, vultures and partridge) and I have Mesozoic bird expert Roger Close to thank for some of the photos below (the rest are mine, but as ever please ask before using them). Right, onto the review.

Seoul Grand Park Zoo

One of the benefits of my recent trip to Korea was an opportunity to visit the Grand Park zoo in Seoul. This is (supposedly) one of the biggest in the world and I can believe it, in 5 hours I barely stopped far 15 minutes for lunch and still did not quite see everything and they were building several new and large enclosures while I was there. It is, in short massive. These reviews of zoos and museums can get a bit same-y since most places have much the same animals / exhibits presented in similar ways, so I’ll keep this short and let the photos take over.

Various Yixian fossils: non-archosaurs ahoy!

Obviously much of the attention on Chinese palaeontology focuses on the dinosaurs and the Yixian is no exception given the spectacular feathered dinosaur finds that have been made there. However while these of course provide us with a great deal of exciting new information about dinosaurs and have grabbed the public’s imagination, there are records of a great many diverse and interesting things preserved in the Yixian. As such it has a decent claim to being the best recoded Mesozoic ecosystem that we know of and perhaps one of the best of all time, there are reptiles, amphibians, trees, crustaceans, mammals, insects, fruits, fish, birds, leaves and more. It’s quite a collection, even if much of it is essentially only present as a two dimensional plan on a slab.

This post is essentially just a bunch of photos from various museums in Lianoning of things on display that show off some of this diversity. As such you can look forward to only a minimal number of archosaurs, but plenty of spectacular fossils. Much of these are unlabeled or are of uncertain identity so forgive me for not adding any more commentary or figure captions, just enjoy the pictures and appreciate what we have preserved in this fantastic fossil assemblage.

The Sino-German Fossil & Geology Park

This museum has been open all of nine months so I’d not be surprised if you had not heard of it before now and I only came aware of its existence very recently. They were the hosts of my quick trip to Liaoning and graciously allowed me to browse their growing collection of fossil vertebrates and even (joy) dig in their own on-site Yixian Formation quarry for fossils. However, since this place is of course open to the public it is the ‘front’ part of the museum that I’ll be talking about in this post.

All dinosaur museums should have these

I’ve been away agin, ill again and have been having more issues with power and viruses and hence the posts have been a bit thin on the ground. Everyhting should be mopre or less back to normal, so expect proper service to resume. In the meantime, here’s a quick post going back to the excellent and fascinating dinosaur museum in Fukui, Japan. I just love the attention to detail here, I mean, if you are going to have a dinosaur museum you might as well commission specially designed and painted manhole covers for the entry points to your plumbing. Why not?

The egg tunnels of Henan

One interesting aspect of the Xixia dinosaur park and museum is that the site actually covers what must have been a dinosaur nesting ground. As with the Zigong Dinosaur Museum which built a museum over the actual fossil layer (and something similar is being constructed in Shandong at the moment) the decision was made to display these in situ and allow visitors to see them as they appear in the rock. However whereas in the case of the former the obvious thing to do was to expose the bones and build a platform over them, here the eggs are deep underground. The solution? Tunnel into the hillside and expose them from below!

Xixia Museum of Dinosaur Fossil Eggs of China

The dinosaur park described recently acts as the entrance to two buildings, both dealing primarily with dinosaur eggs. I’ll cover this bit (the actual main museum with a horribly convoluted name) quite briefly as there is not much to say about it that has not been said about other museums on here before (oh, do check out the new ‘Museums etc.’ category where I have cobbled together my various museum and zoo reviews and sections on the workings on museums). However there were a few nice touches that are worth talking about and of course the huge collection of eggs.

Henan Dinosaur Park

Our recent trip into the field was based in the town of Xixia in south western Henan in central China. In the last couple of years they have opened a major museum cum dinosaur theme park thingy with two separate museum buildings to house their collection of eggs and bones, some animatronic dinosaurs and outside a huge collection of concrete life-sized replicas of famous dinosaurs.