Blog Archives

Friday Fossil Feature – What Makes a Fossil Hunter Happy? Finding His Porpoise!

By Robert Boessenecker (@CoastalPaleo) and Sarah Boessenecker (tetrameryx) Happy Fossil Friday! Porpoises belong to the modern family Phocoenidae, and are one of the less diverse ‘families’ of modern echolocating whales (Odontoceti), with six species in three genera. They are all

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Friday Fossil Feature – 4 Specimens are Dolphinately Better Than 1

By Robert Boessenecker (@CoastalPaleo) and Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx) Happy Fossil Friday! Earlier this week a new paper from CCNHM paleontologist Robert Boessenecker was published in the open access journal PLoS One, reporting new anatomical details for the extinct dolphin Albertocetus

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Friday Fossil Feature – Sinking Your Teeth into Coronodon

By Robert Boessenecker (@CoastalPaleo) Happy Fossil Friday! Last week saw the publication of a new paper naming our spectacularly preserved toothed baleen whale Coronodon havensteini. The article was published in Current Biology by Jonathan Geisler and Brian Beatty from NYIT,

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Friday Fossil Feature – Fintastic surfprises from Lee Cone’s Whale

by Robert Boessenecker (@CoastalPaleo) & Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx) Happy Fossil Friday! Two weeks ago, fossil collector Lee Cone (President of the Special Friends of the Aurora Fossil Museum) donated a spectacular skeleton of a large baleen whale (Mysticeti) from the

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Friday Fossil Feature – A Closer Look at the Echo Hunter

By Robert Boessenecker (@CoastalPaleo) and Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx) Happy Fossil Friday! We all know that odontocetes (toothed whales and dolphins) use echolocation – this bio-sonar allows them to find their way under water and hunt their prey. They send a

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Friday Fossil Feature – An Over-Whale-Ming Donation!

By Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx)   Happy Fossil Friday! Today we’re writing to thank local fossil collector, and founder of the Palmetto Paleontological Society, Mark Bunce. Mark has a passion for fossils, and started our local fossil club 2 years ago;

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Friday Fossil Feature – whale, whale, whale, it seems all is not lost after all!

By Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx) and Robert Boessenecker (@CoastalPaleo)   Happy Fossil Friday! Today we’re looking at Agorophius pygmaeus, one of the first named odontocetes from North America. Agorophius has a long, complicated history –  and it starts right here, in

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Friday Fossil Feature – The head bone’s connected to the… neck bone…

By Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx) Happy Fossil Friday! Fossils don’t prepare themselves, and rarely come out of the ground looking the way you seem them on display in a museum. Here at the CCNHM, we are building a team of dedicated,

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Friday Fossil Feature – Kogia let us tell you about earbones again?

By Robert Boessenecker (@CoastalPaleo) and Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx) For Fossil Friday this week here’s a couple of pygmy sperm whale earbones from the recently acquired Rita McDaniel collection at the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History. McDaniel led mine tours

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How we spent our Spring Break

By Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx) Spring break: a time for fun, relaxation, road trips, and partying… for students at least. For visiting researchers Dr. Morgan Churchill and Dr. Brian Beatty, it was a prime time to visit the collections at CCNHM

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