7 good reads recommended by Burke staff

Tell us what you're reading this summer 
in the comments below or on Facebook or Twitter. 
Photo: Simon Cocks / Creative Commons

Whether you're heading out on the road or hanging out in the sun, summer is a great time to explore new worlds through reading.

The following seven books are recommended by Burke staff for your summertime enjoyment—whether you like the prehistoric or present, natural history or culture—or all of it!

Be sure to check out the end of this post for museum-related offers for summertime readers.

Creativity unearthered! Some favorites from the mammoth naming contest

UPDATED 4.14.14

We just couldn't wait to share a few gems from the mammoth naming contest even though our judges are still hard at work selecting the winning name.

All in all, over 1,000 entries came in! Once the judges make a decision, the winning name will be announced Friday, April 11, at 7 pm, on our Facebook page and the following Monday on SeattleMammoth.org (where you can also follow the tusk's progress and learn more about mammoths).

For now, here's a sampling...

Next steps for Seattle mammoth tusk

UPDATED 3.20.14

The Seattle Mammoth had a Twitter account up and running within a day of its tusk being discovered, but when it comes to next steps for the tusk itself, the pace may be a bit more... well, glacial.

Step 1: Stabilize

"For every day you spend collecting something, you can spend weeks,
months or even years getting the preparation work done."
—Bruce Crowley, Burke Museum Paleontology Lab Manager

Diggin' the South Lake Union Mammoth

By Dave DeMar

On Tuesday, February 11, 2014, an employee of Transit Plumbing, Inc. discovered a Columbian mammoth tusk at a South Lake Union construction site in Seattle. I had heard about its discovery that day but hadn’t given it much thought beyond “you never know when or where fossil discoveries are going to turn up.”



The Columbian mammoth is Washington's state fossil and had tusks
up to 15 feet long. These mammoths ranged across North America
until the last glacial retreat about 11,000 years ago.
Image by Charles Knight, 1922, public domain.

The following Thursday around 8:30 a.m., I received a text message from Dr. Christian Sidor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Burke Museum and University of Washington Associate Professor of Biology, asking if I’d like to help excavate the mammoth tusk. “Sure!” I immediately responded, thinking what an adventure it would be to dig up an ice age animal in the middle of a city.

Which came first: Grass or the teeth to eat it with?

38 million years ago, mammals native to South America began evolving teeth similar to the horses and camels in North America. Did they adapt to similar environments?

How do animals adapt?
Adaptations are evolutionary changes in an organism's behavior or anatomy that make it better suited to its environment. They are a product of natural selection, but figuring out why a particular adaptation evolved is a trickier question.

Bringing a Triceratops to Seattle



Dinosaurs capture the attention of museum visitors of all ages. (Watch our 30-second Dino Shake video to see just how much a few of our staff members and their kids love dinosaurs.)

Here at the Burke, we have several dinosaurs in our galleries, but we also maintain a vertebrate paleontology collection with more than 50,000 specimens. Nearly 90% of these specimens are fossil mammals, with the remaining 10% comprising dinosaurs, fossil fish, fossil birds, fossil marine reptiles, and other fossil reptiles. 

Researchers study these specimens to learn about the life before us, as do University of Washington (UW) undergraduate and graduate students taking paleontology and evolution courses.

So, when a team led by Christian Sidor, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke, discovered a Triceratops in a rock formation in eastern Wyoming, he set out to bring more of the iconic dinosaur to Seattle. 

A young visitor admires a Triceratops in the Burke gallery
Photo by Carol Swales

What really killed the dinosaurs? K-12 teachers are helping us find out

By Gregory P. Wilson

Many of us think of extinction as a terrible process that strips us of amazing biodiversity. On one hand, that’s certainly true. It’s estimated that more than 99.9% of living things that once existed are now extinct! On the other hand, extinctions often benefit the survivors.

As a paleontologist with the Burke Museum and University of Washington, I examine the evolution and ecology of early mammals in the context of major events in the earth's history.

Dr. Wilson in the field.

There’s no better example of this than the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs (except for birds) and allowed mammals to expand into all corners of the earth, all body sizes, and all modes of life.

Marine fossils from around the world contain important clues to understanding this mass extinction event. But relevant terrestrial fossils, including dinosaurs, can only be found in a handful of places.

One of the most famous and intensively studied fossil sites is the Hell Creek badlands in northeastern Montana, where the type specimen of T. rex was discovered in 1902 by paleontologist Barnum Brown. In the 1980s, this area became a testing ground for the ‘Alvarez hypothesis’, which posited that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs in a geologic blink of an eye.

Piecing together Patagonia's ancient vegetation

Fossil site in Patagonia, Argentina.

Most people hardly notice what's on the ground beneath their feet. But to researchers like Regan Dunn, a graduate student studying paleobotany at the University of Washington, fallen leaves provide invaluable clues to understanding how climate change impacted life on earth - and how our actions today will shape the future.

Regan is part of a team led by Caroline Strömberg, Burke Curator of Paleobotany, that is studying 40 to 18 million-year-old plant and animal fossils found in Patagonia, Argentina. “This was a time with major climate change and some extinction events, so we really want to understand how vegetation was affected by these changes.”

To understand the impact of climate change on Patagonia’s vegetation, they set out to reconstruct what types of vegetation existed in ancient Patagonia. To collect data, Regan visited Costa Rica - which has a modern climate similar to that of ancient Patagonia.

Unearthing a Fossil: Giant Turtle Edition

We're often asked what it takes to get a fossil out of the ground and ready for research and museum display. The answer: it can take weeks, months or even years worth of work.

In this short time-lapse video, Burke Museum fossil preparator Bruce Crowley walks us through the process with our giant turtle fossil—from digging it out of the ground and wrapping it in a jacket, to chipping away tiny bits of rock with a series of miniature jack hammers.

Meet Our Giant Turtle

Last summer the Burke's fossil preparator, Bruce Crowley and a team of volunteers excavated a giant turtle - but finding it was only the beginning.

The fossil was first spotted on this rocky outcrop. Bruce and volunteers dug around the area where the bone was visible to make sure they got every piece of the fossil.

Enough of the bone was showing to tell that they belong to a prehistoric soft-shelled turtle (the family Trionychidae). The geology of the area tells us that it's about 49 million years old.

Bruce wheels in the giant turtle.

The fossil and the rock surrounding it were covered - first with aluminum foil (or paper towel or toilet paper), then with plaster. The aluminum foil prevents the plaster for sticking to any exposed bone, and makes it easier to remove once it's back at the museum.





Inside this plaster jacket are the fossil remains of a 49-million-year-old turtle. But for the moment, it's covered in rock and it's heavy.

Now that the jacket is in the fossil prep lab at the Burke, the team can begin to remove the rock that surrounds the bones.

Once the rock is removed, the turtle could prove to be the biggest fossil turtle in the Burke's collection.

Bruce uses a cast cutter to open the plaster field jacket. The black tube in the upper left of the photo is a vacuum to suck up plaster dust and dirt. Bruce wears a mask to protect his lungs from plaster powder.

The fossil prep setup. Bruce uses a vacuum cleaner to clean up dust in the work area.

After a couple weeks of work, fossil bone is exposed. It may not look like much, but what you see here represents a lot of work.

The sandbags are used as wrist rests while Bruce works on the bone with air-powered "micro jacks" - tiny, miniature, hand-held jack hammers.

In this close-up of the work area, taken about 2 weeks after the field jacket was first opened, you can see part of the fossil bone exposed. The orange stuff in the upper right is glue to keep the rock from splitting while Bruce is working and breaking the fossils inside.

You can see the giant fossil turtle this Saturday at the Burke's annual Dino Day. From 10 am (9 am if you're a Burke member!) to 4 pm, get an up-close look at the turtle and talk to Bruce and other Burke paleontology experts. 

Posted By: Winifred Kehl, Communications

The Dinosaur in the Lobby

Paraphysornis brasiliensis

Like many natural history museums, the Burke has a dinosaur in the lobby. Ours just happens to be a terror bird. (All birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds!) In honor of this year's Dino Day, meet our terror bird.

The theme of Dino Day this year is "Predators and Prey"—and terror birds were top predators. These giant flightless South American birds had huge hooked beaks and sharp claws. Ranging in size from the 3-foot-tall Psilopterus lemoinei to the 10-foot-tall Brontomis burmeisteri, they probably killed their prey by stabbing it with their hooked beak. Their strong legs might have helped hold down struggling prey while the beak stabbed and ripped it.

Terror bird foot

As for who they ate, we can't be sure. Larger terror birds probably could have eaten small- to medium-sized mammals.

There are no birds alive today close enough to terror birds to tell us exactly how they lived and hunted. Modern large, flightless birds—ostriches, emus, rheas, and cassowaries—are not hunters (although they can be dangerous). Terror birds' closest living relatives, the seriema, may be close to what the smallest terror birds looked and acted like.

Terror bird head

The Burke's terror bird is a cast (replica) of Paraphysornis brasiliensis. It lived in Brasil 23 million years ago.



Dino Day 2012 is coming up on Saturday, March 3rd!

Posted by: Winifred Kehl, Communications

Fossils and... LEGOS?

If you’re like me, you have fond memories of playing with LEGOs as a kid. Hours upon hours spent creating fortresses to keep out monsters or making search and rescue helicopters to help save your city from the latest natural disaster.

These stackable toys are fun, but did you know they also serve an important role at the Burke Museum? Our paleontology fossil preparators use LEGOs to help make casts of real fossils in the Burke's collections.

Fossil casts allow for 3-dimensional lightweight copies of a fossil to be made for educators to use in their classrooms and for researchers wanting to study a particular specimen from the Burke's paleontology collections.

Why we use LEGOs
The tight fit of the LEGOs doesn't leak the silicone we pour around the fossil to make a mold.



An Ammonite fossil covered in silicone. The silicone
is the “mold” the plaster is poured into to make the cast.

Another benefit of using LEGOs is that we can build a close perimeter around oddly-shaped fossils like this Gorgonopsian’s canine and partial lower jaw:

Even though it’s only a part of one section of its jaw,
this fossil is pretty big and oddly shaped – a great
example of why we use LEGOS.

After creating the silicone mold of the fossil, we pour plaster into the mold to finish the process of creating a 3-dimensional cast. Here's what the end result looks like:


The real fossil will stay at the Burke but thanks to LEGOs and the rest of the casting process, the silicone mold can be used several times to create additional casts.

Do you have LEGOs to donate?
“LEGO DUPLO” (like the ones in the photos) are the most useful for making fossil casts, but we will happily accept donations of LEGOs of any type.

If you have any unwanted LEGOs at your house that you'd like to give a new career in our fossil prep lab, please drop them off at the Burke Museum admission desk during the month of September 2013. Thanks!

Science Behind-the-Scenes: Paleontology Edition (Part 2)

Do you want to work in the fossil collection of a museum and be surrounded by fossils all day? In this edition of Science Behind-the-Scenes, meet the people who work in the paleontology (fossil) collection, learn about what they study, and meet some of our favorite fossils!

A Leptauchenia skull.

The Burke's paleontology collection houses over 3 millions fossils (as you'll know if you've read Part 1) and quite a few people (live, not fossilized), too!

We've got curators of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants, a fossil preparator, a handful of graduate students doing research and collection work, a legion of volunteers, scientists from the University of Washington and elsewhere doing research, and one collection manager to rule them all.

There's a lot going on! One of the most important jobs is keeping the fossils safe and organized. With this many fossils, if you put something in the wrong drawer it might be lost for years! (This is no exaggeration!) With good care and attention, the Burke's fossils will be available for research and exhibits forever. That's the goal of paleontology collection manager Ron Eng. 

Caroline's favorite fossil: grass silica.

The Burke's curators are scientists and specialists in their field - for example Caroline Strömberg, curator of plant fossils, is a paleobotanist. She studies the evolution of grasslands (technically speaking, grass-dominated vegetation) during the last 70 million years and how it affected animals. Curators help the collection by being experts - they identify fossils, help interpret fossils for exhibits, and help manage the fossil collection. Caroline's favorite fossil? Microscopic minerals left over from prehistoric plants: "My favorite fossil in the Burke collection is early Miocene microscopic silica from grasses that reflect the earliest grasslands that spread in North America."

Fossil preparator Burce Crowley prepares fossils, which means removing them from rock and gluing them if necessary. His job fascinates just about everyone who visits Burke's Behind-the-Scenes tours and really deserves its own blog post (stay tuned!).

Jonathan's favorite: Geomyid skull and skeleton.

Graduate students from the University of Washington help with collection work (like organizing or numbering fossils) and use the collection for research. Graduate student Jonathan Calede from Dr. Greg Wilson's paleontology lab uses fossils in the Burke's collection to study the evolution of mammals. He looks at the teeth of fossil mammals and compares them to the teeth of mammals in the Mammalogy collection to figure out what extinct animals ate. Jonathan's favorite fossil at the Burke is a skeleton of a prehistoric pocket gopher, a Geomyid.

Bradon's favorite: an Antarctic crocodile femur.

Brandon Peecook from Dr. Chris Sidor's paleontology lab recently returned from fossil-hunting trips to Antarctica and Africa. He looks for fossils there to bring back to the Burke. He studies how different groups of animals are related to each other and how they evolved. This helps him understand the diversity of extinct ecosystems that we have no other way of reconstructing: "Currently my favorite fossil at the Burke is the half femur brought back from Antractica that may actually belong to an early relative of crocodilians - something totally unknown from Antarctica before our recovery of the specimen."


Stay tuned for more from Science Behind-the-Scenes! We'll take a look at Bruce Crowley's job and find out how you get fossils from the field (like in Antarctica!) to the museum.

Posted By: Winifred Kehl, Communications

Our Favorite Fossils - Anatotitan

My left hand compared to Anatotitan's left foot.

It's true that ugly fossils are important, but that doesn't make giant duck feet any less interesting!

Anatotitan means "large duck" but the critter in question was actually a duck-billed dinosaur (a hadrosaurid). They grew up to 39 feet long - 6 feet short of your average school bus. At that size, it's no wonder his (or her!) foot dwarfs my hand. My palm is about the size of one of his (or her!) toe bones.

Anatotitan lived during the Late Cretaceous - 68 to 65.5 million years ago - at the same time as Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor, pterosaurs, small mammals like Eomaia, marine reptiles and birds. The Cretaceous ended with one of the largest mass extinctions in Earth's history.

Montana (starred) during the Late Cretaceous. (Dr. R. B.)



This fossil was found in the Hell Creek formation in Montana in 1987. University of Washington's Dr. Greg Wilson and his lab dig for fossils and what they find ends up here at the Burke!

You can see this very Anatotitan fossil at the Burke's Dino Day (and you might notice that it's featured on the Anatotitan's Wikipedia page!)

Posted By: Winifred Kehl, Communications

Science Behind-the-Scenes: Paleontology Edition (Part 1)

 Oligocene fossils fill this cabinet.

Have you ever been to the Burke and wondered what's in the rest of the building? Behind the exhibits (actually, under them, around them, and above them!) are offices, the exhibit workshop, and enough cabinets full of wonder to make Indiana Jones jealous.

In this edition of the new feature Science Behind-the-Scenes, meet the Burke's fossil collection and find out the secret of our ugly fossils!

Our gorgeous Xiphactinus guards the ugly palm.

As a paleontologist (someone who studies dinosaurs and other prehistoric life), my favorite cabinets are, of course, the ones filled with fossils. And the Burke has a lot of fossils – over 3 million – including plants, animals, invertebrates (like snails), and even fossilized pollen. Only a few of the Burke's fossils are on display because there's just not enough room to show them all. You can visit dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts in the Life and Times exhibit or see fossilized plants and pollen in the Estella Leopold display under the giant Xiphactinus.

The Ugly Palm

One secret about the fossils that you do get to see on display – they're usually the pretty ones, but not necessarily the most important. Many of the fossils in the cabinets are pretty ugly – but ugly fossils are important! It's not common for living things to fossilize when they die – conditions have to be just right – and every fossil can tell us something about the past.

A great example of this is the fossilized palm plant in the Estella Leopold display. The palm looks like a dark brown bug splat on a grey rock, and it's covered in glue and surrounded by plaster. But this is the first and only palm fossil from the area it was found and it tells us a lot about what that area was like millions of years ago because palm plants need a warm and wet environment to live. Without this ugly fossil, we might not know as much as we do about how the climate in North American has changed over millions of years.

A drawer full of oreodont teeth.

Another fossil treasure that might look like trash is this drawer full of teeth. What good is a drawer full of teeth if you don't have the skull that goes with them? As it turns out, teeth – even without the rest of their bodies – are great for paleontologists to study. Teeth are really hard and preserve better in the fossil record than other bones. Teeth can even tell us whose skull they came from. A mammal paleontologist can tell the teeth of different mammals apart just by looking at them (and maybe using a few reference books). So a drawer full of teeth can tell us what kinds of animals lived in an area and how many of them there were.

And that can tell us all sorts of other things, like how animal communities change, so stay tuned for the Paleoecology edition of Science Behind-the-Scenes! And look for more Science Behind-the-Scenes at the Burke to learn about the mammal, bird, fish, and DNA collections, the collection managers who make research at the Burke possible, and the scientists who use the collections  –  and what they've discovered.
Posted by: Winifred Kehl, Communications

Ask the Burke: Bird or Dinosaur?

This Ask the Burke is based on a question from Adena Mooers, a reader from Bellingham. Her question was:

“When a three toed footprint fossil is found in sandstone in Washington, how can you tell if it is a dinosaur/lizard or a large bird? We have recently had Diatryma footprints found in Whatcom County. They look very similar to the dinosaur footprint we saw at the Burke last Friday.”

Burke Museum Paleontology experts answered:

Great question. If you find a fossil footprint and want to determine whether it was a bird or a dinosaur, here are a few tips:

We all know what a typical bird’s foot looks like. Most birds have four toes. And in most species, the first toe (digit I) points backwards. The second, third and fourth toes are counted from the inside of the foot (digits II, III and IV). Chicken feet are probably the most familiar example.

Birds and dinosaurs are closely related, so it may be difficult to them apart. The currently recognized distinction is that “dinosaurs” include two groups: the birds, or avian dinosaurs, and the “non-avian dinosaurs.” But, many non-avian dinosaurs have feet that are very similar to typical bird feet.

And we have all seen bird tracks. How do bird tracks differ from non-avian dinosaur tracks?

For most birds, flying is the principal means of locomotion. So bird feet have long and slender toes that consist mostly of bone, tendon and scaly skin. For the non-avian dinosaurs, their mode of travel is by foot and their feet are relatively more robust. Comparing animals of the same size, the non-avian dinosaur foot will be more heavily built.

Fossilized heron tracks from approximately 50 million years ago, on display in the
Burke Museum’s Life and Times of Washington State exhibit.

Bird footprints are characterized by: slender digit impressions, impressions of three front digits (digits II, III and IV) and a fourth posterior digit (digit I), the front digit impressions (digits II, III and IV) converge, and lastly, there is usually a wide angle between digits II and IV.

In most cases, bird footprints are quite distinctive. However, as you can tell, determining a species from a fossilized track is an exercise in deductive reasoning.

The Burke Museum partners with the Seattle PI's Big Blog to answer commonly asked questions about the natural and cultural history of our region. This post originally appeared on the Big Blog on July 27, 2011.

Got a question for next time? Send it here!

Volunteer Spotlight: Paleontology Edition

This month's Volunteer Spotlight features the work of Don, a volunteer in the Burke Museum's Paleontology division.

Jessica, volunteer coordinator: Hi Don! Tell me a little bit about the volunteer work you do at the Burke.

Don: I volunteer in Paleontology in the basement at the Burke, but I get to spend a lot of time outdoors in the field collecting specimens, which I’ve been doing on and off since 1983.

Jessica: How did you end up volunteering at the Burke Museum?

Don: Originally I received my MFA from UW and worked in the gardens on campus, and I got involved after I found a fossil out at the Swauk Formation in Kittitas County in 1983. I didn’t know what it was, so I brought it in to the Burke and Bev Witte, one of the long time volunteers here, immediately identified it as part of a turtle from the Middle Eocene. Since then I have continued to hunt for fossils, volunteer at the Burke and learn about paleontology. I volunteered from 1983-95 and then moved across the country, but continued to come back and volunteer for short periods before finally moving back to the area in 2009 and volunteering regularly since then.

Jessica: What do you like most about volunteering at the Burke?

Don: I like field work the most. Usually I do field work locally, but most recently I went to Colorado for a week to work at the Denver Museum Snowmastodon Project with several other volunteers and paleontologists Kirk Johnson and Ian Miller. We found bones from mastodons, sloths and tiger salamanders.


Jessica: What is the funniest thing that has happened while volunteering?

Don: Usually I collect by myself, so there aren’t too many funny stories to tell! I collected for a week at the Snowmastodon Site for the Denver Museum in June. Paleontologist Kirk Johnson was very loud and encouraging to the volunteers, and was working hard while digging for bones right alongside us. At one point he yelled out to motivate the volunteers, “Bring me the head of a sloth!” and not too long after, someone found one!

Jessica: What would surprise people about what you do?

Don: I think people would be surprised about the size a collection can reach over a period of time. I volunteer at the Burke about 50 hours per week, plus field work. I have worked on developing the collection related to the Tertiary period, primarily at the Swauk Formation where I found the partial turtle, but I have collected throughout Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia.

Before modern technology, we used to heave fossils onto the photocopier and send the copies to researchers around the country. This helped identify the Burke Museum among researchers, and bring graduate students and academic interest to the museum. The Burke Museum has come a long way, and now we have three curators in paleontology – paleobotany, vertebrate paleontology, and invertebrate paleontology.

Jessica: Briefly describe your most memorable project.

Don: One of the biggest finds I have made was one of my first – the partial turtle found at the Swauk Formation. Since then I have continued to focus my collecting on that area, collecting on Chuckanut Drive at first and then moving inland. We are accumulating a collection of animal footprints including the Terror bird from the foothills around Mt. Baker, similar to one found in the Burke Museum lobby right now.

Thanks, Don, for all of your contributions to the Burke Museum and for sharing your wonderful stories with us!

Posted By: Jessica Newkirk, Volunteer Coordinator

How to Make a Fossil Cast: A 10-step Guide

If you came to Dino Day this past weekend, especially if you came with a kid, you probably saw the Burke’s brand new fossil dig pit.  In the dig pit was a cast of an ichthyosaur fossil from the museum’s paleontology collection.

And you may have wondered: What steps go into creating a cast of a fossil?

Creating a fossil cast is a multi-step process (I’ve reduced it here to 10 steps). Over a few days in January, I followed around fossil preparator Bruce Crowley and his team of volunteers as they worked on creating the mold and pouring the cast of the ichthyosaur.

Step 1: Get the original fossil out of storage and uncrate it.

Step 2: Identify the area around the fossil that is going to be cast; build a barrier and apply a layer of silicone to the fossil -- this will easily come off later (the silicone in this picture is purple).

Step 3: After covering the rest of the exposed fossil with plastic (gotta protect it!), begin to spread on a layer of plaster (in this case, a material known as Hyrdocal). While spreading the plaster, add criss-crossing layers of fiberglass sheeting—this will reinforce the Hyrdrocal and make a nice plaster jacket for the fossil. Be sure to work fast and don’t forget to wear gloves and a mask.

Step 4: Come back the next day and the plaster jacket is complete!

Step 5: Very carefully, remove the plaster jacket from the silicone layer.

Step 6: Remove the silicone layer from the fossil. See, I told you it would come off easily!

Step 7: Back in the lab, place the silicone layer (aka the mold) on top of the plaster jacket (for reinforcement) and build a wall around the silicone. If this step is overlooked, the material used to pour the cast will spill over and onto the floor!

Step 8: Pour the cast into the mold! (Again, using a brand of plaster known as Hydrocal) When done, the cast will look like this:

Step 9: Remove the cast from the mold.

Step 10: Paint the cast…it helps accentuate the different parts of the fossil!

There you have it! It’s a perfect cast of a real ichthyosaur fossil! And the kids at Dino Day loved uncovering it in the dig pit.

Posted by: Julia Swan

Updates from Antarctica

Two weeks ago, a team of paleontologists from the museum began their journey to Antarctica for a two-month fossil hunting expedition. If you missed the video we posted about what the actual trip down to the southern-most continent is like, watch it here.

Well, they made it:

Exiting the plane at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

The Burke team is joined by scientists from The Field Museum, Augustana College, the University of Alberta, and the Iziko South African Museum. Together, the group is looking for dinosaurs and other fossils in the Transantarctic Mountains.

If you’re curious to know more about what it’s like to conduct field work in such an extreme place as Antarctica, The Field Museum has an excellent expedition website with lots of totally fascinating information about this 2010-11 Antarctic expedition.

I easily got sucked into the site, which includes photos of camp life, dispatches from the field, and more about the fossils that have been found in Antarctica so far. Here are three surprising things I learned from The Field Museum’s expedition site:

• Back in the day (i.e. 250 million years ago), the Earth had no polar ice caps. Antarctica was part of the super-continent Pangaea and was actually temperate in climate, hence the abundance of plant and animal fossils from species that would never survive in polar Antarctica today.

• Of the species found in Antarctica so far, many were wholly new to science, such as the first dinosaur found on the continent, Crylophosaurus.

• Because of the severe cold and altitude, many of the traditional tools used to stabilize fossils (e.g. fossils and glue) don’t work in Antarctica. As a solution, excavators will wrap small fossils in toilet paper to protect them in transit back to the United States.

Before leaving Chicago to meet up with our crew from Seattle in Antarctica, two of the paleontologists from The Field Museum recorded this video about their expedition. Watch it to learn more about what their goals are for this trip:




Find more online at The Field Museum.

Posted by: Julia Swan, Communications




Dinosaurs in Antarctica? – Antarctica Video Report #1 from The Field Museum on Vimeo.

Video: how do you get to Antarctica?

Think your holiday travel plans are extreme? Can you imagine if you were traveling to Antarctica? That's exactly what Burke Museum curator of vertebrate paleontology Christian Sidor and two UW graduate students, Adam Huttonlocker and Brandon Peecock, are doing this Sunday, as they depart for a two-month trip to search for fossils in Antarctica. Along with an intrpeid group of paleontologists and geologists from across the country, the Burke team will explore the rocks of the central Transantarctic Mountains for evidence of ancient life.

So how does one actually get to Antarctica? Unsurprisngly, it's not quite as simple as just booking a flight. I sat down with Adam and Brandon the week before their trip to talk more about what it takes travel to the world's harshest, coldest continent. In this short video, they discuss what it will be like to arrive in Antarctica for the first time:


Stay tuned for more stories from their trip.

Posted by: Samantha Porter, Operations