Mesozoic Mind

In Montreal, there is a place I wanted to visit but only got the chance to last February when I went with my parents while in the city. Yes, it's a museum. The Redpath Museum . In fact its the oldest purpose-built musuem building in Canada, just so you know, starting in 1882. It's also home to Hans Larrson of Dino Lab fame, even saw his office there (though not him). The first floor doesn't have much to it, though there is a general theme of marine life. Most prominent is a small hall called Creatures from the Deep with various marine tetrapods, from whales to marine reptiles to the extinct Stellar's Sea Cow. The exhibit is pretty nice, with a pretty good selection of taxa organised around one theme in eyecatching ways, reminiscent of those galleries in many british museums (including the NHM). While I can't really remember any details in the signage, I didn't mind them. There are a few other cabinets on this floor, lik one with a fossil fish among other specim...

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....

The  Tampa Bay Times  published an article I just had to comment on because it piqued my interest, and it will pique yours too. The basics: Florida Man donates contraband dinosaur to glorified soft play. Concept art from the press release Long story more long, two years ago, the world's largest known specimen of Triceratops (first found by a private group in 2014) was put up for auction in Paris after display in Trieste, Italy for a while, then sold for a whopping 7.7 million and attracted a large outrage from paleontological circles, not wanting a valuable specimen to be lost to science. Now, it has resurfaced as its owner have come forward as Floridian entrepenuer Sidd Pagidipati, and he's apparently going to loan it to the small Glazer Children's Museum in Tampa, FL for three years (or more), now renovating an entire floor and education centre to help accommodate it. I'm quite mixed on the news. On one hand, I'm glad such a magnificent specimen got into a museum ...