A New Focus in our Natural History Display !

Over the summer we have been rearranging our natural history display to give both a more comprehensive overview of the regions natural history as well as giving more information about the artifacts. We rearranged our geology display, giving it better lighting and more identification, with an emphasis on the oil industry. Our osteology (bone) display now not only speaks to the bison and other ice age animals, but also several different animals that come from the north Peace Region with an emphasis on comparative craniology and dentition. We also identified more from our palaeontology display, which emphasizes ancient sea life in Alberta.  Finally, we improved our archaeology display, giving visitors the chance to see almost every angle of our stone tools.

Our Natural History display. 

The display features everything from dinosaur bones, to a meteorite, to a partial bison spine, to arrowheads, and even the tooth of a woolly mammoth.  We invite you down to the museum to get up close and personal with our artifacts and to learn from our new display.

The Osteology display case featuring bison bones and other animals. 

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.

Dinosaurs Roaming the Peace

Big! Awesome! Scary! Cool!

These are all words that are often used to describe dinosaurs. Who doesn’t love the idea that over 65 million years ago, there were dinosaurs running around in our very own province? We even have a dinosaur named after our province, the Albertosaurus. We, at the museum, certainly think it’s cool. We didn’t know until just a few short months ago, that in our collection is a partial tooth from an Albertosaurus.

Also in our collection are a vertebra of a hadrosaur tail (backbone), two ichthyosaur vertebrae (marine reptile backbones), ammonites, baculites, coral, brachiopod shells, bison bones, a mammoth molar, and many more.

To help us learn more about the exciting field of paleontology, Grande Prairie Regional College (GPRC) is coming up to Peace River on Thursday, June 16th, 2011 for a Fossil Roadshow, complete with school presentations, public drop-in times, and a public presentation.

Come and join the museum in learning about dinosaurs and fossils from Katalin Ormay and Robin Sissons, paleontologists from GPRC on Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at the Athabasca Hall. Public drop-in sessions are from 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM and from 3:00 – 6:00 PM. At 7:30 PM is the public presentation.

Dinosaurs at Peace River Museum

Let’s compare teeth … Yup, teeth!

Take a look at the picture below and take a guess as to which is a dinosaur tooth and which is a mammoth tooth.

If you guessed dinosaur for the small tooth and mammoth for the large tooth, you’re right!

The small, partial tooth is from an Albertosaurus, a meat-eater that looked a lot like a Tyrannosaurus rex, just a bit smaller and lived during the cretaceous period. Albertosaurus was about 8-9 metres long, 3 metres tall at the hip and weighed up to 3 tonnes. It had short arms with two-fingered hands and long powerful back legs with three-toed feet for speed and agility. The “Alberta Lizard” was first discovered in 1884 by J.B. Tyrrell along the Red Deer River in Alberta.

This Albertosaurus tooth may look small but it would have been razor-sharp 75 million years ago, perfect for tearing flesh.

Contrary to the “Alberta Lizard”, the mammoth was a grazing plant-eater that fed mostly on grasses. They were ancestors to but larger than the modern Asian elephant. They lived during the Pleistocene era, also known as the American Ice Age and died out at the end of the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. They were about 5 metres long, up to 4 metres tall at the shoulder and weighed up to 3 tonnes. Their pointed, curved tusks could be up to 5 metres long, though they usually ranged from 3-3.7metres long.

With how large the mammoths were, they would have spent up to 20 hours a day grazing for food. In that case, it’s fortunate that the mammoths teeth were composed of layers of compressed enamel plates, held together with cementum. This composition made them very strong and resistant to wear, since eating grass is a hard thing to do and really wears at the teeth.

Come and join us to learn more about palaeontology, the study of fossils from past ages, on Thursday, June 16th, 2011. Robin Sissons and Katalin Ormay, palaeontologists from Grande Prairie Regional College will be with us at Athabasca Hall from 12 noon – 1 PM and 3 – 6 PM for public drop in sessions and again at 7:30 PM for a public presentation on Northwest Alberta Palaeontology.