paleontology

An interesting popular geology and paleontology book. Long, but it has a lot of great ideas, I recommend reading it.

This is a 60-year-old reconstruction of an Oviraptor, from Discovering Dinosaurs, by Glenn O Blough, pictures by Gustav Schrotter, copyright 1960 by Glenn O. Blough. Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 60-8020, Weekly Reader Paperback Book Club edition published by arrangements with McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY.

I believe this is the picture that got me interested in dinosaurs, and from dinosaurs, I became interested in paleontology.

A Museum You Should Visit

You should make the trip to Thermopolis, WY to visit the Wyoming Dinosaur Center This museum has the most mounted skeletons of Mesozoic vertebrates I’ve seen in a single institution, plus many more interesting fossils or casts.

Wyoming Dinosaur Center has some great Paleozoic material. There’s a placoderm and ostracoderm exhibit, covering important taxa that you don’t see exhibited often. The Center has two Dunkleosteus armored skulls, both different than the cast on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The End Ordovician Extinction seems weird to paleontologists. There’s a lot of agreement on the earth cooling at the end of the Ordovician, right up to evidence of major glaciation and a harsh ice age, but there are serious suggestions for the cause of the glaciation or extinction that will boggle your mind.

Thalattosuchians are an under-rated clade of mesozoic animals. Part of Pseudosuchia, the crocodile-like archosaurs, they were completely adapted to a marine lifestyle.

That’s the shoulder and pelvic girdle of the plesiosaur (elasmosaur maybe) skeleton cast that the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery has on display.

Looks like three groups of marine diapsids, ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, and thalattosuchians, all evolved “hypocercal” tail fins.

A Museum You Should Visit

If you happen to be in Casper, Wyoming, you should visit Tate Geological Museum. It’s a small, but very well done geology and paleontology museum. There’s interesting things for most family members, even well-informed 4-year-olds could have fun and learn things.