Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Free Dinosaur Course

Some of the technicians that lead the volunteer preparations of Mosie the Mosasaur informed me about a FREE online, self-paced course from the University of Alberta that is an introduction to dinosaur paleobiology.  The course is titled Dino 101 (https://class.coursera.org/dino101-002), and has a deadline of completion in mid April.  Now I need to add Dinosaur Provincial Park to my world travelling bucket-list.

Canada also made the news with another site already on my bucket-list, a new awesome quarry location for the Burgess Shale.

Ceratopsian dinosaur Chasmosaurus bellis

In other news, I just submitted our Great Backyard Bird Counts.  This year we recorded 17 species in our little backyard of suburban DFW.  The most exciting was watching 120 Cedar Waxwings descend upon our neighbor's red oaks. It's fun to watch the submissions keep coming in real-time.

Next on my to do list is to start recording observations to http://www.inaturalist.org/
That's another fun place to look at observations... like someone just posted river otter tracks near Bastrop, TX. Very exciting!