Curator presents dinosaur talk at the Galt

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If you are interested in the dinosaurs which used to roam southern Alberta several million years ago, you will want to check out the Galt Museum’s guest speaker this Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 7 p.m..
Donald Henderson, the curator of  dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller who will be the featured speaker at The Curator Presents.  Henderson will lead a tour of the Galt Museum’s new exhibit Dinosaurs & Company and lead a thought-provoking discussion on New Fossils, New Ideas - Our changing views of dinosaurs and how they lived.
The past 30 years, and the last 10 years in particular, have seen great changes in our ideas about dinosaurs and their ways of life. An average of 15 new dinosaur genera are now being described every year, and each year there are more and more people working in the field and in the laboratory studying dinosaurs.
"These new discoveries have, at the very least, increased our knowledge of the range of body sizes represented by dinosaurs," according to Dr.Henderson in a press release, "from tiny carnivores like Microraptor gui with a body and tail length of just 50 centimeters to giant herbivores like Paralatitan stromeri with an upper arm bone 1.69 meters long!"
"Dinosaur fossils are known from all the world's continents, including Antarctica and Greenland, and we now realize that dinosaurs rapidly spread across the world soon after their first appearance in the Late Triassic about 230 million years ago. The dinosaur fossil record is much more than just skeletons. We have trackways, skin impression, nests with eggs and brooding adults, eggs with embryos, eggs inside bodies, bite marks made by one dinosaur on another while they were still alive, evidence of cannibalism, and even some internal organs preserved in an exceptional specimen of a small carnivore from Italy."
He will also be discussing how fossil evidence points to dinosaurs  being related to birds
Dr. Donald Henderson holds a B.Sc. In Geology and Physics from the University of Toronto, 1992 and a Ph.D. In Vertebrate Palaeontology & Biomechanics from the University of Bristol, 1999.  Current research projects include estimating body masses of pterosaurs and numbers of dinosaur skeletons lost to erosion in Dinosaur Provincial Park.
Upcoming research includes working with researchers from Natural History Museum in London on locomotion in armoured dinosaurs (stegosaurs and ankylosaurs); revising a walking pterosaur computer model; and studying the large Lethbridge/Korite elasmosaur collected in 2007.  This year,his expected fieldwork includes collecting a large hadrosaur from the Horseshoe Formation; collecting a small tyrannosaur from DinosaurProvincial Park; and dealing with the usual fossil surprises that appear yearly.
The Curator Presents... is free with admission and for annual pass holders, and includes refreshments and exhibit access.  The Curator Presents... is one of several programs and events offered in conjunction with the related exhibit Dinosaurs & Company on display at the Galt Museum & Archives until January 31.
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