Gearing up for the BA Festival of Science – Science Explosion

Team members have been busy all week preparing for the BA Festival of Science which is taking place at the Liverpool World Museum over the weekend.  Many of us have been “burning the midnight oil” going over the plans we have for our part of this exhibition that will feature the likes of the Open University and many national museums as well as ourselves waving the flag for palaeontology.

Our intention is to bring a little bit of the Mesozoic to Merseyside by recreating Charmouth beach at the museum and encouraging the young visitors to go on a fossil hunt to see what they can find.

We have built two, large collapsable wooden trays, each lined with plastic that will form the framework for our beach display.  These trays will be filled with pebbles, gravel and all sorts of typical items you would find on a beach.  However, in amongst all the stones will be fossils of belemnites, ammonites, crinoids, brachipods, pieces of ichthyosaur bone and other cool stuff, representing what you would find if you visited places like Church Cliffs or the Black Ven on the Dorset coast.

As well as providing a glimpse into the Jurassic, our team will be bringing over some life-size cast replicas of dinosaur fossils including the premaxilla and maxilla (upper jaw) of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Tyrannosaurus Maxilla

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

The casts will give young people the chance to get to grips with some really exciting dinosaurs, as well as T. rex we have the dentary (lower jaw) of a Triceratops, some fossil dinosaur poo from a sauropod and lots of teeth and claws so that people can see for themselves just how big some of these critters got.

Should be a fun day, we will take a camera so expect a couple of pics.

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