Last of 2014

For the last post of 2014, check out this blog post on the Stoney Brook web page by UT Austin PhD student Anna Weiss.

(Blog Post)

Happy New Year and all the best for 2015!

Too much beige!

I decided there was too much beige in the office and microscope room by my office, so I thought I'd add a little bit of relevant artwork!

A shot of one of my field sites in my office!

Some photomicrographs (and other nice shots) in the microscope room

One of my PhD thin sections with bored and encrusted Austrian corals!

A pretty awesome reef shot (taken by Bill Martindale)

Some ooids in cross polars (Turks and Caicos)

And last but not least, an Albertan Ammonite (purchased from the Royal Tyrrell Museum)

For those who want to know, these are photos printed on canvas.

A little decoration

We decided to add some decals of marine organisms to the cabinets.

I think it makes the cabinets look pretty fun/awesome, and it works, since there are fossils of the same creatures inside the cabinets!

We still have another coral and a squid to add once we fix the two cabinet doors on this side.

What do you think? My grad students all think they are pretty awesome.

Just waiting for a fumehood

So Close! We're still missing a few key things (namely a fumehood) but I think the lab is looking pretty awesome!

Almost time for some of this!

Kraken Rum- Delicious and appropriate for studying squids!

New Website

After a lot of hard work, the new UT Austin Martindale Lab website is now live!
Check it out, there is lots to see! Student profiles, research topics, field photos, and of course information about what is going on in our little world.

Inaugural Fossils

Well, the lab is not 100% complete yet, but today we brought in the first fossils! All three of my awesome graduate students were on hand for unwrapping!

Coming together

My Lab is starting to come together! It is really exciting to see the room cleaned out and ready for the slick new cabinets and work benches!

Soon there will be a fumehood next to the sink!

Space for more work benches, cabinets and tables!

Work benches and cabinets ready to go in!

This giant table (with mechanical lift, very excited about that) will go in the center of the room for working on fossils!

Good bye Drumheller

Good bye Drumheller... Your strata and fossils sure are awesome!

Behind the scenes at Drumheller's dino museum!

This past month I have been mixing up field work with time at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller. While the public side of the museum is pretty amazing, I think the part that the public doesn't see is even cooler! Check out the catacombs with me!

Alberta is famous for their plethora of Ceratopsian species (i.e. the Triceratops family)... they line the shelves in the prepared specimen room!

They also have some amazing stromatolites!

Here's a beautiful Plesiosaur discovered by Dr. Betsy Nichols.

A stunning ichthyosaur skeleton from the Posidonia shale of Germany. The outline of this one is made through polishing the rock (i.e. it is not real) but several Posidonia ichthyosaurs have real skin outlines! That's how we know that they had a shark-like tail (the vertebrae only goes into the bottom part of the tail).

Lambeosaurus!

Here's Selva, my MSc student, standing with a huge replica of a jaw bone (sorry I don't remember what species)

OM NOM NOM!

These trilobites died happy! ;) Check out those eyes!

Check out these amazing Green River fossil fish and a palm frond! The Green River Formation is one of the most iconic lacustrine Lagerstätte deposit (a Lagerstätte is an exceptional fossil deposit that preserves features such as soft tissues, guts, skin, and feathers that are almost never preserved in the fossil record.

An wee little plastic ankylosaurus on an oil sands ankylosaurus fossil!

The Skull!

An wee little plastic Mosasaur with a mosasaur skull found in the ammolite mine!!

Check out the puncture on the jaw! That's a tooth from another mosasaur that bit this guy. Based on the bone, this wound had already started to fester when the mosasaur died!

*Box contains dinosaurs*

Look at these amazing pike fish!

In the museum you can look at the scientists preparing the specimens.... behind the veil you can look out at the people!

Plastic pleisiosaur on a plesiosaur ribcage!