Recently Hans Larsson gave a great description of an average year on the Vertebrate Palaeontology Field course for the McGill Reporter. If you are a university student, not just at McGill, you too can spend 2.5 weeks digging up dinosaurs in the badlands of Saskatchewan and Alberta and get course credit for it to boot. While next summer may seem like a long way off, it’s not too early to start thinking about using this course to fill a science requirement for your degree!
July 1, 2009
Yukon Dinosaurs
Alex Dececchi and Matthew Vavrek recently returned from a trip to the Peel River in northeastern Yukon Territory, where they joined Dr. David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum in search of dinosaur fossils. This was the second year to the region, and while the trip last year yielded a Paleocene plant fossil site, this year two vertebrate fossils were discovered. While the amount of material was relatively small, their importance is large as there is so little vertebrate material from these extrememly northern areas.
May 5, 2009
Frenchman Formation Terrestrial Ecosystems Conference
The Frenchman Formation Terrestrial Ecosystems Conference is coming up soon in Eastend, Saskatchewan. The conference, obviously on research relating to terrestrial ecosystems of the Frenchman, is going to be held at the T. rex Discovery Center in Eastend, home of Scotty the T. rex. A number of our lab members will be presenting talks at the conference, and we’ll post their abstracts as soon as we get a hold of them.
April 22, 2009
Rates of evolution in theropod forelimbs
Recently Hans Larsson published a paper in Paleobiology entitled “Patristic evolutionary rates suggest a punctuated pattern in forelimb evolution before and after the origin of birds“. The paper discusses how the evolution of the bird wing has progressed in a step-wise fashion, and that the origin of birds actually shows few morphological changes going on.
Dececchi, T. Alex and Larsson, Hans C. E. 2009. Patristic evolutionary rates suggest a punctuated pattern in forelimb evolution before and after the origin of birds. Paleobiology 35:1-12.
April 18, 2009
Planning for the 2009 Field Course
We have started planning for this year’s vertebrate palaeontology field course in southern Saskatchewan. We’re planning on splitting our time between Eastend and Grasslands National Park. For the full details and dates on what’s going on, check out the handout (vp-field-course-guide-2009) for everything.
