“Meet Hank” and “Hands-on learning” with Mission Jurassic
Research and impact 31 July 2019
Two recent posts by Dr Victoria Egerton and Professor Phillip Manning for The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis highlight UoM student involvement in ‘Mission Jurassic’, and how ‘Hank’ is helping with the search for micro-vertebrates.
Excerpts from ‘Hands-on learning at the Mission Jurassic site’
In spite of the frustrating weather patterns this year, we’ve been able to make remarkable progress at the Jurassic Mile. Through the teamwork among crews from The Children’s Museum and our partnering institutions—The University of Manchester, U.K.; The Natural History Museum, London, UK; and Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands. Our teams include a mixture of faculty, curators, preparators, technicians, PhD students, Masters students, Undergraduate students and very knowledgeable volunteers. We are very thankful for their long hours of hard work and dedication this season. They have been really amazing!
A hands-on experience like this can be life-changing—especially when it’s your first time on a dig like this. We’ve had students from the University of Manchester working at the site for a few days. This is their first time in Wyoming and, for some, their first time in the USA. For most, it’s their first dig.
You can read about the UoM students involved with the dig at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis blog.
By Dr. Victoria Egerton, Children’s Museum Paleontologist-in-Residence, Research Fellow University of Manchester
Excerpts from ‘Meet “Hank,” the micro-vertebrate sieving machine’
In order to reconstruct this lost world, we aren’t just interested in the big dinosaurs. We want to paint the big picture about life during the Jurassic Period. So we are also very interested in the really small fossils—including the micro-vertebrates. These aren’t always the tiny remains of dinosaurs, as the Jurassic ‘Titans’ tend to be pretty big. They’re the small beasties that were running between dinosaurs’ toes. The more we know about micro-vertebrates, the better the picture we can paint of the Jurassic Period itself.
David Ward, Scientific Associate with the Natural History Museum in London, has made a career out of making huge statements about some very small things. He has spent his life sieving micro-vertebrates. He has developed a machine where, thanks to the use of running water, the specimens don’t really move very much. Water moves around the material and actually separates the tiny fossils from the encasing sentiment. We call this contraption “Hank”.
By Professor Phil Manning, Professor of Natural History at the University of Manchester and Children’s Museum Palaeontologist-in-Residence
You can find out more about Hank at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis blog.
Follow Professor Phillip Manning on Twitter @DrPhilManning
Follow Dr Victoria Egerton on Twitter @DrVEgerton
Children's Museum of Indianapolishands-on learningHankmicro-vertebratesMission Jurassic
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