SOSNOWIEC, POLAND — The above full-scale model of Tyrannosaurus rex is one of my favorite dinosaur reconstructions. It sits in front of the Earth Sciences Building at the University of Silesia. Since it is outside the lighting is always dramatic, and the artists paid close attention to even tiny details like the reported coat of downy feathers on its back (see below).
The roughening you see in the upper half of the image represents the feathery covering. We can only imagine what colors were present in the original.
Here is a new Polish colleague I met this morning. Alina Chrząstek is a paleontologist at the University of Wroclaw. She is a specialist in invertebrates and trace fossils. A few months ago she sent me photos of rock and fossil specimens she had questions about, and I told her we could meet when I was in Poland. She came today with boxes and bags of specimens, a few of which are shown below.
These are glacial erratics from a moraine in southwestern Poland. They are rocks of a variety of types and ages scraped up by glaciers in the north and deposited in the south. Alina is sorting through what fossils are in them. It is a fun collection because it contains rocks from the Cambrian to the Cenozoic, with all manner of trace and body fossils. They can be quite a challenge to identify because the stratigraphic context is gone.
Half my day was spent writing, so I have nothing else to report. Tomorrow, though, is going to contain a field trip to the Góra Świętej Anny Mountain. (I hope everyone is noticing how hard I work at getting the Polish letters correct!)
