Thursday, June 23, 2011

Fun at the Fossil Road Show

Dinosaurs, rocks, fossils and minerals are certainly interesting subjects, and the residents of Peace River seem to agree. More than 240 people, including 117 students visited Athabasca Hall last Thursday to learn about Northwest Alberta Palaeontology from Grande Prairie Regional College palaeontologists Katalin Ormay and Robin Sissons.

There were slide shows of photographs and interesting facts, a floor puzzle, colouring sheets, crosswords, rocks and minerals to identify, and dinosaur bones to touch. In the photograph to the left, the Winters boys, Noah (7), Jabin (5) and Jude (8) show us the floor puzzle they completed and Noah also shows us a dinosaur he coloured and put together with moveable arms and legs.

The museum was delighted to host this event so that we too could learn more about palaeontology. Following the Road Show on Thursday, Katalin and Robin were at the museum on Friday, to help us identify all of the pieces in our collection. This project took all day and was fun for both the museum and the palaeontologists. They tell us that we have quite a wonderful collection!

This Road Show as well as the identification of the museum’s pieces stem from Robin’s first visit to Peace River to find out what sorts of palaeontology artifacts we have in our collection. They were quite impressed and offered to come up again to help us identify all of the pieces. There just wasn’t time in her first visit to identify it all.

We invite you all down to come and see this collection! It was unknown to us until last Friday, but we have another Albertosaurus tooth and another dinosaur bone in our collection. We can also boast that most of the bison bones in our collection are from the Ice Age, so they are at least 10,000 years old.

The museum would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Katalin and Robin as well as everyone that attended our event.

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