A Visit To the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Part II: Terror of the South & the Nature Research Center

Clash of the titans.

Having covered the Prehistoric North Carolina exhibit at the NCSM (North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences), it's time to head on into two other fossiliferous displays.

The first of these is the impressive Terror of the South dome, which is probably fair to call the museum's centrepiece exhibit. The other is the Nature Research Center, which opened a few years ago as a new wing to the museum, so it was totally new to me on this visit. All photos were taken by yours truly, click the break to continue...

A Visit To the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Part I: Prehistoric North Carolina

Albertosaurus on the hunt. 

Over the summer, I took a trip to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCSM from here on in) in Raleigh. It's a big, beautiful museum with an awful lot to see, free admission, and a stellar museum shop. Since the museum's collections are quite extensive, I'm going to stick to the palaeontology parts as that's the general thrust of Noah's Ravens but I could always revisit the other collections I photographed - mainly animals, taxidermied and living - at some indeterminate future time. Of course, I said I would post pictures just after I visited, and that was back in July, so... maybe I shouldn't get ahead of myself.

All photographs were taken by me. Click to see them below the break...

The Most Wondrous Duckbill In All the West

In the in-development video game Saurian, which I wrote about recently far beyond recent memory, the world of the very-Latest Cretaceous environment preserved within the sedimentary rocks of the Hell Creek Formation is brought to life. One of the most abundant large animals in this ecosystem is a large, shovel-mouthed herbivore belonging to the group of dinosaurs known as hadrosaurs, or more commonly in the popular parlance, duckbills.

In Saurian, the Hell Creek duckbill is called Anatosaurus annectens. This not the name most people in the palaeo community use for this animal.  In just about all sources for the last few decades, the Hell Creek duckbill is called Edmontosaurus annectens. So what's up with the name Anatosaurus?

The duckiest duckbill, usually called Edmontosaurus annectens. Its scale
patterns are based on 'mummies' that preserve fossilised skin impressions.
[art by the author]