As you may know if you look at this page occasionally, for the past couple of years we have been working with a beautiful fossil of a pliosaurid plesiosaur, which was collected by Wayne Buckley from western Manitoba. We are now at the stage of preparing a permanent exhibit of the fossil, which will be installed in the Earth History Gallery this summer. So we have been very busy in…
Tag Archives: skeleton
Pliosaur Progress: We’ve Been Busy!
Posted in Geology & Paleontology Also tagged Cretaceous, exhibit, fossils, paleontology, plesiosaur, pliosaur Comments closed
Flipping the Skull
The plesiosaur skull, as it appeared in our temporary exhibit last winter. It is exciting and interesting to work with the fossils of large vertebrate creatures, but this is a field with many complexities. During the fossilization of most vertebrates, the bone was replaced by other minerals, which makes the skeletal components both heavier and more brittle than they were during the animal’s life. For those of us working in the “back rooms”…
Posted in Geology & Paleontology Also tagged Cretaceous, Manitoba, paleontology, plesiosaur Comments closed
Isn’t it iconic? Don’t you think?
What are the Factors that Make an Exhibit “Iconic”? In the last little while we have been working on the plan for a new exhibit in the Museum’s Earth History Gallery, which will be focused on a large specimen that we recently added to the collections. Around here we like to refer to the specimen and the planned exhibit as “iconic.” But what does iconic really mean? And…
The Old Museum Lives On
Winnipeg has a long and complicated history of museums featuring natural history collections. Our current museum was a centennial project, opened in 1970, but we are very fortunate that we possess vestiges of those earlier museums, such as minerals from the Carnegie Library collection and mounted animals from some of the early taxidermists. The most visible and best-documented of these “inheritances” are pieces that were exhibited in the old…
Posted in Collections & Research, Exhibit, Geology & Paleontology Also tagged cephalopod, fossils, paleontology, plesiosaur, Tyndall Stone Comments closed
Display of Detritus and Delight
The spaces that house Museum curators and collections are, perhaps, notorious for appearing to be crammed full of objects. Our work consists of collecting and organizing, and actively-collecting Museum scientists typically have many specimens spread out for study and cataloguing. Our collections rooms contain many thousands of well-organized specimens, but it is tricky to find space for the largest pieces. For this reason, some of our biggest specimens are not…
Posted in Collections & Research, Exhibit, Geology & Paleontology Also tagged fossils, museum, paleontology Comments closed
An Exhibit with Teeth
We loved doing this exhibit. To us, it was an opportunity to explore some of the best aspects of the traditional Natural History museum. And the public seemed to thoroughly enjoy it; we would always see family groups in the exhibit, animatedly discussing the various skulls and comparing their similarities. It really showed us that traditional exhibits can still fulfil an important function in the modern museum!
Posted in Collections & Research, Exhibit, Geology & Paleontology Also tagged fossils, paleontology Comments closed
