Royal Tyrrell Museum hosts Homeschool Day

 Good news for homeschoolers! The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology is hosting its Homeschool Day on May 19, 2023.

You can read all about this event and activities that are planned, at this link: https://tyrrellmuseum.com/whats_on/special_events/homeschool_days Programs are filling up already. Go to their website and book space in one of their terrific activities for young students! The prices are low and include gallery admission.

This museum is well worth visiting at any time. I've been there with my family and recommend it for everyone interested in museums, fossils, or geology.

Fossil Microbes

Paleontologist Andrew Knoll has just been awarded the Crafoord Prize for Geosciences, a prestigious international award from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The academy chose Knoll to honour his work on understanding the first 3 billion years of Earth's history. 

By examining layers of bedrock, Knoll can learn not only whether it is volcanic or sedimentary but also the age of the rock. He is one of many scientists discovering tiny living things that became fossils in the rock long ago, and he's one of the best in the world. These fossils are the tiny ancestors of every living thing on Earth. Learning about them is key to understanding the world's worst mass extinction.

Knoll has travelled the world, studying rocks in Newfoundland and Norway, China and Siberia. He's found tiny fossils from microbes that lived three billion years ago, a time when scientists used to believe there was no life yet on Earth. When the Mars probe Opportunity was sending back images from 2003 to 2018, Knoll was interpreting the data. He has kept his sense of wonder since he was a child finding fossils in the Appalachian foothills. And it was while caring for his own child, awake one night, that Knoll considered an idea that might explain the Permian extinction.

During the Permian extinction, 90% of species in the ocean and 70% of land animals died. Knoll wondered if that mass extinction might have been due to a rapid rise in CO2. He and his colleagues discovered the source of that CO2, a massive area of volcanic activity now called the Siberian Traps. 

You can read more about Dr Andrew Knoll, his research, and his award at this link.

Move Over SUE, There's a New T. rex in Town

Photo by Claire Eamer

by L. E. Carmichael

Of all the dinosaurs in all the world, SUE the T. rex might be the most famous. The most complete T. rex skeleton ever found, SUE is likely also the most well-traveled. Her bones, or at least casts of them, have been displayed all over the world. The casts I saw in Nova Scotia came with bilingual displays written in English and Arabic!

But there's a new king of the dinosaurs in town, and his name is Scotty.

Named after a bottle of Scotch the scientists toasted his 1991 discovery with, Scotty is only 65% complete, compared to SUE's 90%. But he stands out for another reason - as far as we currently know, he's the biggest carnivore ever to walk the earth.

As any forensic anthropologist will tell you, there's a certain amount of instinct and guess-work involved in reconstructing height and weight from nothing but bones. But measurements of Scotty's femur (the long, heavy bone from his thigh) suggest he was in the ballpark of 19,500 pounds - almost a ton more than SUE.

He was also a senior citizen - at approximately 28 years old, Scotty lived longer than any other T. rex we currently know about. And he was a tough old dude, surviving a broken rib, fractured tail bones, and an infected jaw. Those injuries showed signs of healing, meaning they likely weren't his ultimate cause of death.

Now that Canadian palaeontologists have had a chance to study him, Scotty will be making his public debut at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum this May.  No word yet on whether he'll be joining his cousin SUE on tour!

Visiting Hoodoos and Royal Tyrrell Museum

Say hello to my little friend! This is Morgan and her auntie, among the hoodoos near Drumheller where she was having fun with science. Seventy million years ago, this area was a shoreline plain and shallow sea where lots of plants and animals lived. Now it's dry and not much grows except scrubby grass and bushes near the streams.

It's al lot easier to learn about geology and paleontology when you run around the hoodoos like Morgan has done, and you're able to see all the layers in the ground that have built up day by day over millions of years. In the Alberta Badlands, there are plenty of places where there's no recent accumulation of soil and plants to hide the layers in the ground. A hoodoo forms when there's a tougher layer that resists eroding. The tough layer makes a cap, and as the softer layers wear away on the sides a pillar can get quite high. Some of the hoodoos are interestingly shaped!

You can see the clay and bits of stone all around Morgan. As the ground is weathering away here, new bits of stone start to show from where they have been buried for millions of years in the layers of sediments. Some of these bits of stone are the bones of dinosaurs and other long-ago animals that have been in the ground so long, they have turned to stone. I've always liked that these bones are called fossils, from an old word for something dug out of the ground. It isn't an everyday thing to find fossils (unless you live near Drumheller!) so it's nice to have a non-ordinary word to name them.

At the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, many of these fossil bones have been prepared for display. Some of the displays use carefully-made replicas of the bones, which are lighter and easier to arrange in the shape of the animal when it was alive. There's an active website for this museum which is as fun to explore as the building. The museum even hosts short courses for distance learning, and it hosts a course for homeschools on paleontology! It's one of my favourite museums.

While some fossil bones are from small animals, people are particularly interested in the animals larger than ourselves. I like to look at this picture, and see how Morgan's little hands and feet have bones like the ones in this dinosaur's foot!

It's easy to tell that Morgan enjoyed her day at the museum, learning about science and the animals of the past! I'll have to find her some books now she's growing old enough to read them and ask questions.