Hello all. In anticipation of writing my first Specimen of the Week post, I wondered which specimen would ultimately receive the honour. I wanted to highlight a specimen representative of my Canadian homeland such as a fossil from the Burgess Shale, but the curator (see SOTW 140) beat me to it. Sadly, the Grant Museum has but one documented specimen from this phenomenally important fossil location. The Burgess Shale has famously yielded dozens of previously unknown 505 million year old fossil organisms such as the evocatively named Hallucingenia, five eyed Opaginia, and the fearsome-looking predator Anomalocaris.

As it turns out, I was able to find an interesting animal from the collection…one which might possibly be a living relative of Anomalocaris!

This week’s Specimen of the Week is… (more…)

These past few weeks some of our exhibits have been rearranged and reinvented. This has included the merciless culling of some specimens, doomed to a life with the other relegated objects in the well-populated store rooms (the existence of which is primarily due to not having enough space to display everything). As I packed them up for transportation, one of them leapt out at me (not literally) and I thought it deserved one last hoorah before it is consigned to the group of specimens to be loved only from afar. And only by those who know it is there. This week’s Specimen of the Week is… (more…)