Hello, thanks for joining us. To kick things off I’d like to start by introducing an exciting fossil preparation project that has been underway since I first became involved with the Conservation Centre, more than a year and a half ago - the Niger Sauropod Project.
Kieran and Erica with a dinosaur bone. Photo by Mark Graham
First, a bit of background history. In 1988, a joint expedition by the NHM and the University of Kingston discovered a partial fossilised skeleton of a large sauropod dinosaur in Niger, West Africa. Sauropods were mostly very large, herbivorous dinosaurs that walked on all four legs (visitors to the museum will be familiar with one in particular, Diplodocus, who has pride of place in the Central Hall).
The fragile bones were wrapped in burlap strips soaked in plaster to form protective jackets, then brought back to the museum to undergo preparation. However, this would take longer than planned- although a single femur was part-prepared for an exhibition, the project was put on the back burner and the rest of the skeleton has lain largely untouched for almost 25 years.
In 2011 the project was brought back to life, spearheaded by fossil preparator Mark Graham, who took on a team of 4 volunteers to the project – Nick Loughlin, Rose John, Erica Read and Kieran Miles (writing these words). Since then, the line-up has changed a lot, with only myself still on the project. Nick and Rose have moved on, though Erica is still with us, having crossed over to the conservation side of things. Under Mark’s tutelage and guidance we’ve managed to prepare a significant number of the bones - I plan to use future blog posts to detail our progress on this exciting project.
So until then, here are some pictures of the original field dig in 1988, courtesy of the NHM’s Picture Library (http://piclib.nhm.ac.uk):
Kieran Miles has a degree in palaeobiology and evolution from the University of Portsmouth. In addition to fossil preparation he works as a Science Educator and behind the scenes tour guide at the museum. He has never written a blog before and still doesn’t really know what Twitter is.
Comments
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Posts like this brhgiten up my day. Thanks for taking the time.
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This is a reminder to ALL MEMBERS and NON MEMBERSThe range is only open on Sat and Sun and hoiadlys from 9am-5pm ONLY There is to be NO shooters during the week at all.These are not club rules,they're City and County rules.Break these rules and the range will be closed for good. Mahalo
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Ok, If all we are going to get are those 3 second kisess that you give to your grandmother, It might bring back the fears I had of this whole 5 months into the relationship thing.
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no way in the world would i give the u.s government my gogole login info!or any other login info for that matter. gogole is pretty naive to be working so closely with government in general and this administration in particular. they have shown themselves to be just as devious and deceitful as previous administrations and downright scary with their secret aims to socialize america. we need less government interference and control in our lives, not more. i trust private industry, not government. keep all these initiatives private. dont cooperate with government. gogole is really starting to scare me now. to me, cooperating with the u.s. government is evil. dont do it.
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The end goal for BrowserID involves nvatie browser support for authentication, using public-key crypto with the keys generated and stored by the browser. browserid.org exists as a compatibility shim to make BrowserID universally available *before* browsers have nvatie support for it; they really need to document that plan better on the site.(Also, you could implement BrowserID server-side without JavaScript; browserid.org implements it client-side using JavaScript to avoid the need for specialized server-side code on each site adopting it, which greatly simplifies adoption.)OpenID requires a webpage supporting a specialized authentication protocol which websites don't normally implement. You can't use OpenID with an arbitrary homepage URL without either hosting an OpenID implementation yourself or delegating to a third-party authentication provider. More importantly, having a personal OpenID that doesn't depend on a third-party account requires hosting a personal homepage, which not every Internet user has or needs. As a result, in practice, the vast majority of OpenID users rely on a third-party identity provider such as the dozen whose icons you show at the top of this form, and that seems unlikely to ever change.BrowserID specifically ties identity to an email address, which everyone with Internet access already has. People can easily obtain an email address in their own name and at their own domain, and use that as their BrowserID, *without* having to seek out additional support for a specialized protocol as in OpenID. Also, almost all sites already want an email address when signing up, so using BrowserID avoids the need to deal with other pieces of information. BrowserID supports changing that email address, so that you don't get stuck with a pile of accounts using when you've migrated to . BrowserID also pre-validates the email address, which means you don't have to redo the usual email-a-link verification with every single site.You mentioned that you have three email addresses and only one homepage. That case actually works *better* with BrowserID, which offers you the choice of which email address you want to use to authenticate to any given site. So, you can easily maintain accounts for , , or , without needing to host three homepages or rely on third-party authentication providers.As for using multiple browsers, BrowserID supports migrating from browserid.org to in-browser authentication without changing anything visible to sites, and browsers which support in-browser authentication will almost certainly support migrating or sharing identities between themselves.So, I personally prefer BrowserID because it gives me more control over my own identity, lets me maintain multiple identities as easily as having multiple email addresses, avoids tying my account with a site to an account I currently have with a third party (and may want to drop in the future), reduces the number of pieces of information I need to provide to sites to one, eliminates the per-site email verification, and provides a path leading to in-browser crypto-based authentication.Does that help answer your question?
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