Tuesday, January 22, 2008

A new semester begins!

Okay, so it's been a while. What am I up to? I'm getting ready to teach my Dinosaur course again, that's what. For those of us in the paleo world, we are sometimes guilty of avoiding dinosaurs, because of their immense popular appeal. However, Dinosaurs are a perfect gateway science. They tell us about the history of life, the relationship between earth history and living organisms. They are an excellent example to use for introducing cladistics to non-scientists, and so on...

I love to use demonstrations in class. It's much more exciting when the professor brings an object into the classroom: something other than a picture on the blackboard. I'm building a few 3D prehistoric animals to show anatomy, give the impression of relative size of various dinosaurs, and so on...




Here's an outline of the skull of Allosaurus fragilis that I'm building at about 1:6 scale.

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