New casting projects

Earlier this week Ray and I took a road trip to the Midwest to evaluate some possible opportunities for producing molds and casts, which we hope to use to expand the exhibits at VMNH.

Could this dentary be from Buttercup?

In July 2011, when we collected the first fragments from the baby baleen whale “Buttercup“, we of course collected a lot of additional material found in the same pit. One piece that went unnoticed at the time was the small fragment shown above.

First Yorktown whale jacket opened

This week we opened the first of 17 jackets from the Yorktown whale, which we’ve nicknamed “Cornwallis”. I had not planned to open any of these jackets until the fall, but it turns out we needed a large whale vertebra for a temporary exhibit opening at VMNH this summer, and “Cornwallis” is the largest whale we have.

A new NSF grant, and new publications site

I recently received word from the National Science Foundation that VMNH successfully applied for a grant related to our fossil insect collections. The grant is part of a collaborative proposal that includes most of the major fossil insect collections in the United States: American Museum of Natural History, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Illinois Natural History Museum, Museum of Natural History at the University of Colorado-Boulder, University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, and Yale Peabody Museum, as well as VMNH.

There are some big whales in the Eastover Formation

As part of a (woefully overdue) book chapter, I’ve been photographing lots of baleen whales from the Chesapeake Group, the unit which includes the Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene formations on the coastal plains of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The vast majority of the Chesapeake Group whales have been found in the Calvert Formation, with only a few specimens from the other units. The Eastover Formation, which ranges from approximately 7-9 million years old, has produced enough scrappy remains to demonstrate that there were several baleen whale taxa present at that time, but not enough for definitive identifications. Even so, there are some intriguing remains from the Eastover.

Airigami comes to VMNH

For the last three days, the balloon sculpture artists from Airigami have been in VMNH’s Hall of Ancient Life, installing a temporary extension of our current “Dinosaurs” exhibit. Just as one of the centerpieces of the exhibit is the cast skeleton of Acrocanthosaurus, the Airigami display is built around a life-size, fleshed-out Acrocanthosaurus, made entirely out of balloons.

Yorktown whale wrap-up

On Thursday we finished up our excavation of the Yorktown whale, racing to beat a weather front that was moving into the area and which would have almost certainly destroyed any exposed bone. We took out several jackets, including one that was around 400 pounds and was going to be a real challenge to get up the cliff. Once again, the Navy stepped up to plate.