Greetings from Panama!

We arrived two days ago. I'm here with 11 educators from CA, FL and NM, Claudia Grant, and Gary Morgan.

Yesterday we went to Lake Alajuela and found some great Miocene fossils. One of our interns Evan Whiting found this beautiful Meg tooth.

Today we go to Gatun to collect Miocene invertebrates. Its all very exciting stuff. Sorry for the short blog, but I have to get ready to go into the field!

You can also follow my daily Tweets @brucemacfadden

A weekend in Maine?

Last Thursday we left for 5 days in Maine to be with friends for a mini vacation. We flew to LaGuardia in NY where the airport was pandemonium, there was no air conditioning, and it was crowded and stifling. That way no one had to go to a sauna because they got one right in the airport. To make things even worse, as we were going to our gate, we saw the following--

So our flight to Maine was cancelled, and they could not rebook us for two days! Bummer. We decided to go into NY and make a short holiday of it, even if we had rather been in Maine.

We stayed on the Upper West Side--near the American Museum of Natural History--where I was a student back in the 70s. On the 4th of July we first went to the New York Historical Society. It is a really cool museum with some innovative exhibition strategies for engaging lifelong learners.  That particular day it was the opening of the Madeline artwork exhibit, so the place was mobbed with family learning groups, some of whom were learning, others just being hypervocal and generally having too much uncontrolled fun.

The NYHS has a cool exhibit called open storage, where their museum artifacts are in the public exhibit area where people can see them as displays. It makes an impact about the size and diversity of their collections. It wasn't science, but it was innovative. We have done this to a limited degree with our butterfly collection--so that the public can look into it.  Here are some Tiffany lamps from the permanent collections at the NYHS. More natural history museums should be doing this so the people can see the collections behind the scenes.

And finally, as we learned from Darcie's talk about effective museum exhibits, they should be evocative, i.e., result in an emotional impact. This happened to me, with the display below of a gouged door from a NYFD fire truck from 911, with photos of 911 in the background.

But we made the best of it anyway. I like to see how other museums, regardless of the content (science, history, art, etc.) do their exhibits and displays.

On the second evening I wanted to show Jeannette Columbia University where I did my Ph.D. So here I am in front of the iconic Low Memorial Library on the main quad.

So if things had gone according to plans, I'd still be in Maine.  But we made the best of it anyway!

CPET teachers and horse evolution

Today we finished the horse evolution module. The teachers came up with some amazing lesson plans using fossil horses. They also are very interested in digitization.

Here we are at the end of the afternoon after finishing up working with the study set and a tour of the McPowell Hall exhibits.

Fossil horses: Down with orthogenesis!

Following up on my blog post from last night, and thanks to Richard Hulbert and Kristen McKenzie for pulling the relevant specimens from our collections, I am now excited and ready for this afternoon's session on fossil horse evolution with the teachers from UF's CPET (Center for Precollegiate Education and Training).

After a brief orientation, the 10 teachers will break into 2 groups to develop a lesson plan about evolution using the fossil horse study set (photo).  I will explain the pitfalls of developing a straight-line (orthogenetic) pattern of horse evolution so they don't go down that path!

Fossil horse study set.

CPET Evolution program

30 June 2014

Tomorrow afternoon I will host 10 Florida science teachers at the Florida Museum of Natural History research collections in vertebrate paleontology. We will tour the collections and then develop a lesson plan on horse evolution. We will then go over to the exhibits museum at Powell hall and tour the Fossil Hall.

This should be fun and I am looking forward to participating in the UF CPET (Center for Precollegiate Education and Training) program.

I will take photos of the activities tomorrow.

TV show and Fossil kits

19 June 2014

This past Monday evening I taped a TV show on the Panama Project with Ilene Silverman. Here is a photo after the shoot, when I could relax.

This morning I presented a talk to 45 summer campers at the FLMNH on Fossils and Paleontology. Lots of enthusiasm, energy, and questions. After a brief introduction I then had the students (1st through ?4th graders) break up in groups and identify fossils in a fossil kit that I assembled for them.  After  they had a time to try to ID the fossils we all went over each fossil one-by-one and compared them to picture I put on the board in a ppt.

They were able to ID some of the fossils easily, others were more difficult. Next time I'd add some plants, invertebrates, and possibly some microfossils in a vial.

Miscellaneous activities

16 June 2014

For my weekly blog----

I really enjoyed the class last week on Diversity, etc. The students were engaged and there was great discussion. Thanks! Wednesday's class on evaluation should be good to--it is a really important component of ISL. I went ahead and nominated someone for UF President. Not sure what will happen, but at least I felt that I tried to be part of the search process.

This evening I was interviewed on a TV show for the Gainesville market about the Panama Canal Project. When I get a picture and more details, I'll let you know. It was fun, and the host, Ilene Silverman, was very gracious.

On Thursday, I'm going to talk about fossils to Callum's summer classes at the FL Museum. This should be fun. About 45 enthusiastic fossil kids.

Then I'm off for a week's vacation and family reunion at a house on a lake in TN, north of Knoxville. I'm probably going to go through internet withdrawal because I heard the connection in the lake house is not so good, and this is one of the few places where Verizon is not so good. What will I do? If it is bad for me, it is likely worse for my three grandsons, so we will all be in the same boat together (as they say).

On July 1st I'm working with UF's CPET (Center for Precollegiate Education and Training)  to do a module on fossil horses, paleontology, and evolution. There will be 10 high-school teachers from Florida. I'm looking forward to working with them, and hope perhaps that we can develop a lesson plan that could be a model for studying horse evolution.

One of our graduate students, Claudia Grant, is organizing a pilot workshop for teacher PD for 3D scanning and printing of fossils. This, coupled with the recent article in the Gainesville Sun, makes 3D S&P all the more relevant. We also have partnered with iDigBio to develop a workshop on 3D S&P for "downstream users," including teachers and members of fossil clubs, to be held in 2015. All good stuff!

I will try to update this blog with photos as they are available.