Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Phil Currie is Honoured

By | April 11th, 2012|Dinosaur and Prehistoric Animal News Stories, Dinosaur Fans, Palaeontological articles|0 Comments

Explorers Club Honours World Famous Palaeontologist

Globe trotting palaeontologist Phil Currie, one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Royal Tyrrell Museum (Alberta, Canada), has been honoured by being awarded the prestigious Explorers Club Medal in recognition of his contribution to palaeontology through his extensive field work.

Professor Phil Currie

Being placed alongside the likes of Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sir Ranulph Fiennes OBE has come as a surprise to the proud Canadian palaeontologist who commented:

It’s shocking and overwhelming; to even be considered is amazing.”

As someone whose work takes him all over the world it is fitting that he should be awarded this accolade.  Professor Currie received his medal at a lavish ceremony held at the Club’s annual gala in New York last month.  It is not known whether Phil had time to visit the American Museum of Natural History whilst he was in the city.

The Explorers Club has been in existence for over a hundred years.  Originally founded to honour polar explorers, this select organisation now counts scientists from many fields, astronauts and of course, explorers of other parts of the world amongst its members.  One of the members of the Canadian Chapter nominated Professor Currie, recognising his work in places such as Antarctica, Argentina as well as in Canada.  We at Everything Dinosaur would like to add our congratulations to him and long may the 63-year-old keep exploring.

Numerous Expeditions

Currie’s work now takes him on regular expeditions to Mongolia’s Nemegt formation where he recent uncovered Tyrannosaur fossils that may indicate pack hunting behaviour and to the foothills of Argentina, to find more new dinosaur species.

Professor Currie stated:

“If you look at my habits, unless it’s work related and I can find a dinosaur there, I probably haven’t been there.  It’s definitely my science and the inquisitive mind about where dinosaurs have been.  What’s the significance of the dinosaurs of Argentina to the dinosaurs of Alberta, for instance.  On the face you’d think nothing, but basically right before dinosaurs went extinct, Alberta-style dinosaurs started showing up in South America.  Why was it so late?  We can learn a lot from asking questions like that.”

When asked where else in the world he would like to work, Professor Currie said that he would like to go to Africa, one part of the world he has not worked in extensively as yet.  Certainly, with a number of new and amazing dinosaur discoveries from countries such as Angola, Botswana and Niger there are probably a lot of prehistoric animal fossil remains on that continent for Professor Currie and his colleagues to explore.

To view models and replicas of prehistoric animals including dinosaurs that Professor Currie has studied: CollectA Prehistoric Life Replicas.