Gallery Milestones …

If you visit this site periodically and have been expecting updates, I apologize for the lack of change.  Things seem to have been spinning very quickly in the past couple of weeks. There’s a lot that I could easily write about, but it has been hard to find the time and energy to grab any one story and give it shape.

As you may know from some previous posts, for the past few months we have been busy with exhibit development at the Manitoba Museum. Quite a lot of this work has been on a revitalization of the somewhat “fossilized” Earth History Gallery.  Most immediately we are renovating all of the exhibits dealing with the Cretaceous Period; within the next year, we also plan to install a multi-screen animation of an Ordovician shoreline.

Last week, the final installation of the terrestrial parts of Cretaceous Life was under way. Unfortunately I had to be in Toronto for much of the week, as I was already committed to attending a conference, and the meetings of the Canadian Geological Foundation. It was a busy week, between conference sessions and trying to get paleontological research done at the ROM with, I admit, a bit of social time tacked on. We wrapped up the foundation’s grant review meetings early Thursday afternoon, and Thursday evening I was winging home in the opulent luxury that is always associated with a middle-of-the-row seat on a packed Westjet flight.

Friday morning saw me back at the museum and dressed in full monkey-suit for the opening. I received a bit of good-natured ribbing for the way in which I had made myself absent for the mass of work that had happened in the intervening days, but they had done a really fabulous job, and some of the exhibit staff may well have been happier that I hadn’t been wandering around looming over them. The opening went smoothly, the media interviews were done, and we are now onto planning the next phases. I will try to post some photos of the new exhibits, once things begin to spin a bit more slowly.

But in the meantime, of course, all of the usual seasonal work also has to happen. It is finally gorgeous early summer in Manitoba, time for natural history staff to load up SUVs and head for the boonies (the remoter the better). My colleagues have already been out a good bit, looking at plants or examining the mating habits of frogs in northern Manitoba. Now it is my turn; we are off to the north in a couple of days, if I can only manage to sort out my claims from the Toronto trip by then …