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 – SeAVP and the Gray Fossil Site

by Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx) and Robert Boessenecker (@CoastalPaleo) Happy Fossil Friday! Last week, museum staff and volunteers traveled to Gray, Tennessee for the 10th annual Southeastern Association of Vertebrate Paleontology. What’s in Gray, Tennessee? Why, the Gray Fossil Site, of

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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 – 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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