Mesozoic Mind

This is just a way to get a post in this month before its too late. Closed Exhibits at the Royal Ontario Musum In March I saw two temporary exhibits at the Royal Ontario Museum that have since left the building.  First, there is Zuul . You may have heard of the Zuul exhibit back in 2017 (it was great), but for aa few months the holotype of the ankylosaur named after the Ghostbusters monster was brought back, the specimen placed against a wall, with a skull cast in a seperate cabinent. It isn't much, but its cool to see again. It just so happemns to be right next to another temp exhibit now closed, the Field Museum's Death: Life's Greatest Mystery , about well, death. It uses both models and specimens to tell the scientific processes of death, how it woeks and nature, and cultural perceptions and practives of moueni Death only features a few fossils in it. The first are a bonebed of the basal camelid  Leptomeryx , part of the section about the processes of death to the body....

Ah, T. rex. It needs no introduction, and even the youngest nor laypeople not familiar with all but the basics of palaeontology know what it is. It has easily solidified itself as THE dinosaur by default, and has studied countlessly more then arguably any other fossil lifeform on Earth. Ironically, being so well known has meant it's been taken for granted, even called overrated versus other dinosaurs, and many, many misconceptions about it, from like merely a scavenger that couldn't even hunt live prey. This is a shame, as Tyrannosaurus is a pretty cool dino on its own, able to crush bone like no other theropods couldn't and had one of the more fascinating growth stages of any of them. T. rex: The Ultimate Predator , organised by NYC's renowned American Museum of Natural History, which came to the Royal Ontario Museum this month and intends to educate visitors on what is known about the dinosaur, from how it evolved from other dinosaurs to how it lived, and bust those m...

I acknowledge I live on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Huron-Wendat and Wyandot Nations. Since October last year there's been a unique little exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. Toronto-based Fisher Creek Cree artist Kent Monkman, who depicts through his two spirit alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle the culture and history of Indigenous people, and the trouble and resilience against White colonialists, lampooning western art that glorified the white thieves (not settlers, they were thieves, plain and simple). I visited it two times so far: one in October when it debuted, and this month on the 8th. You can also view paintings on his website . Now a warning to any Indigenous reader: I'm not one of you (I'm South Asian-Canadian), so I might and will get things very wrong. I apologise in advance. While the primary focus is on Indigenous culture and history, there are a few fossil specimens at the...

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. To cap off Juneseums month, here are the exhibits for extinct life I've visited in life, worst if not least good to absolute best. Do be aware that 1) I'm focusing on permanent exhibits, and 2) I haven't visited most of these in years if not months, so I don't have the most accurate memories at the time of writing, and I made have forgotten a few exhibits and a lot of the details over the years. #5 - Ripley's Believe it or Not, Niagara Falls This may seem like a weird place to list, but this franchise of the famous "museum" at the Tourist Trap that is Clifton Hill, Niagara Falls, does have a dinosaur skeleton and a few other fossils on display, specifically  Monolophosaurus , an ichthyosaur, and a proboschidean skull, and not a whole lot else (though I do remember a tuft of mammoth fur somewhere here). A further gallery also has an Allosaurus skull, which in total is a quota y. I am certain they're all casts an...

Hello and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind . However, today we are not tackling dinosaurs or even the Mesozoic for the most part. rather, we are delving into a different group of fantastical creatures, one from our own imaginations. The name?   Fantastic Beasts™: The Wonder of Nature . On June 18 (after a week-long delay) I went to the Royal Ontario Museum for a temporary exhibit about mythical creatures and real ones and how they intersect, using Harry Po- sorry, the Wizarding World as inspiration, courtesy of  She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-cuz-of-Issues-Beyond-Scope-Of-This . It's all told through both taxidermy specimens from the NHM, props from the movies, and replica models of the creatures. The basic layout of it the exhibit goes like this: the first section is about mythical creatures of European Mythology and their inspirations, like how trading Narwhal tusks created Unicorns, or how manatees inspired unicorns.  The second section is about various animal behaviours ...

For my birthday (well weekend afterwards) in 2021, me and my mother went to the Royal Ontario Museum, and several times afterwards. I loved all of it, but me being me, I looked most forward to the museum's dinosaur gallery, the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs. They were good, but I did feel they could be better, and with some of if not a lot of the info and exhibit design outdated to the 2000's, it's due for a renovation. Now today we're doing something new: Palaeo-Redo , where I reimagine works of palaeo-media, both as I would have done or could be improved. And without further ado, I present... The Ahmed Family Gallery of Dinosaurs ! The new gallery will be themed around the jaws and teeth of dinosaurs and their diets and evolution. In one direction, if you arrive from the Dawn of Life Gallery, the axis would be the latter and how environmental change impacted them. In the other direction, is the anatomical differences between clades of dino...

If you haven't noticed, a certain dinosaur skeleton from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada has become the blog's background mascot. Its name has been designated as ROM 768. ROM 768 has long been (literally) overshadowed by Gordo the Barosaurus just metres away from it, yet it has an equally fascinating history and arguably greater impact on the world. It it the holotype specimen of Parasaurolophus  and more specifically the type species P. walkeri , arguably the famous and recognisable of the hadrosaur dinosaurs. It’s the most complete specimen of it ever found so far, and indeed very few other specimens have been found. Casts of it have been featured in other museums and attractions worldwide. With its discovery and description, we were led to breakthroughs in the study of communication habits of dinosaurs. Meanwhile, for the last 100 years, most reconstructions of it have borrowed much from it, most notably as a notch over its haunches once thought to be a...