Reddit

I’m about to launch a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’, with the screen name of ‘davehone’. Obviously I’ve answered tons of questions here before, but here’s a chance for something different. Cheers.

A fifth anniversary tyrant

The next few days are likely to be very busy for me and this weekend I’m off on holiday, so I very much doubt I’ll be blogging on next Monday. This is a bit of a shame as those who occasionally glance at the bottom half of the sidebar on the Musings will realise that it pretty much marks the 5th anniversary of the blog. Of course very longtime readers will know I was going for some months on the old Dinobase site before cranking up this version on wordpress, but this has for most people always been the home of my pronouncements, even if there is also now Pterosaur.net, the Lost Worlds, and various bits on other parts of the web too.

So I’m naturally really rather pleased to have reached this mark, having also not too long past gone over 1.25 million hits and 1250 posts on here. It has, obviously, been a lot of work. While naturally there have been plenty of short posts (even one liners, and those of just a single image) and a fair number of guest pieces, I’ve obviously poured a huge amount of time and effort into this over the years, and I’d like to think it’s made a fair impression on a goodly number of people. Plenty of great dinosaur blogs by interesting and talented researchers seem to have fallen by the wayside, so if nothing else I can claim a fair bit of persistence.

Right, well to ‘celebrate’, here’s some pictures of a Tyrannosaurus mount from the Tyrrell that I was going to post anyway (so hardly the greatest party ever thrown really). Still, it’s hardly an inappropriate thing to include as I have done my share of tyrannosaur work and this is a neat mount. Oddly, I wasn’t too happy with the photos originally, you can’t see too many details, but I rather like the way this looms out of the murk with the animal trailing off into darkness.

Although the skull looks great from either side, once you get a shot up the nose, it’s rather clear how distorted this is. There’s quite a bit of difference between the two sides and it’s obvious there’s been a fair amount of squishing to the bones to give this rather asymmetric appearance.

Well, that’s it for now. Not sure if there will be another 5 years, but I’m not planning on stopping just yet and I’ll be annoyed at least if I don’t reach 1500 posts having gone this far, though with my other commitments, it may take a good long while yet.

Black Beauty

So here is one of the absolute classics of palaeontological mounts – the Tyrannosaurus specimen known as ‘Black Beauty’. Actually from a scientific perspective I don’t really like these panel mounts, they tend to cover up too much of the actual details of the bones, but to be fair, from the point of view of a visitor and the display aesthetics, they can be spectacular and this one certainly is.

Obviously a fair bit of this is not original and is reconstructed material or casts (I didn’t look close enough to check which) and most notably while there is a good skull it’s not stuck way up there. That’s obviously a good thing from a safety perspective, a fall would utterly destroy it, but what is odd is that while the skull is on display, it’s not next to the mount. Instead, it’s currently in the next gallery in the series and sits alone in a rather fetching ‘picture frame’ case with some of the museum’s other prized specimens.

 

Naturally those producing displays need to be mindful of a great many things and it’s understandable (if frustrating) that researchers are not closer to the top of that list. However, given the amount of Tyrannosaurus material available at the Tyrrell and just how good this looks, I have to admit, I’m pretty much giving this one a pass.

Tyrrell educational displays

These are almost the first things in the Tyrrell once you have made it past the opening tyrannosaurs, and it’s a great set-up for the main exhibitions. Obviously kids will want to run through and see the skeletons, but from the educator’s point of view, you do want to maximise their enjoyment and appreciation of the material, and well, if you can get them to learn something too that’s obviously a bonus. In this case these two stands are pretty simple in design, but obviously do their jobs well – they are clear and stark and use very obvious examples which should be easy to understand for young kids, and of course lean heavily on things featured in the galleries (tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs are plentiful to say the least), but without resorting to huge numbers of primary colours and cartoon-like illustrations which I think can be rather unnecessary. In short, great stuff!