This week has been fantastic and looks to only get better. So far we have taken a tour of the museum, even the collections downstairs. My group practiced looking for fossils in sediment. We had no more prep than our students will have. It was helpful to experience what our students will experience. However, we got a second opportunity to look for fossils and we found many more.
In a perfect world in my teacher after-life, I will end up in Museum Nirvana.
The giant crocodile looking thing is Sarcosuchus imperator (flesh crocodile emperor) and lived about 110million years. Paul Sereno and his team found a specimen in Gadoufaoua in Niger. National Geographic did a special about Sereno’s team recovering the fossil and making a model for display. The skull the team found was almost complete and was about 6 feet long. Not something you would want to encounter in the water or land for that matter.