These past few months have been a little hectic, with a combination of fieldwork, teaching, PhD students completing, research and synchrotron time (above, Nick, Roy and Victoria contemplate a white-noise free environment). All this is splendid fun, but time has become a rare commodity to be carefully managed...when possible!
The Cheltenham Science Festival in the Summer seems to be the last time when our team had a 'break'...but even then that involved over 15,000 folks coming to talk to us about our science...this really was great fun. I only recently returned the hadrosaur borrowed from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (above) from this event.
A highlight of the last few weeks was visiting an old student of mine, Matt Lowe, at the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. He kindly gave some colleagues and I a brief tour of the museum stores...given I was returning a research loan...and we got to see some of the crown jewels of the collection. My favourite had to be the Galapagos finch (above) collected during the voyage of HMS Beagle...yes, one of those finches!
Our field season in Wyoming this year was spectacular. We worked in the Green River Formation of Wyoming, before heading to the Morrison Formation, again in Wyoming. There were so many beautiful fossils this year, it would be wrong of me to highlight just one...needless to say, many will be scrutinised by the searching light of both SLAC and Diamond Lightsources in the future.
While we did not exhibit at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition this year (above the 2014 'X-Appeal' stand from Manchester), we did take our exhibit to the RAL/Diamond Open Day event, that saw over 15,000 members of the public visit the event.
I get to build the Gorgosaurus again at Diamond later this week, as we have a schools event this coming Friday and another series of Open Days on Saturday and Sunday. So if you missed the Gorgo at Diamond this summer, come along this weekend!
