Dinosaur diaries The newsletter for Dinosaur Isle; the premier dinosaur museum in southern England. In this issue 2006 exhibition Out of Africa - Dinosaurs of a lost world. Displaying local finds. A model of Baryonyx – the biggest predatory dinosaur on the Isle of Education News. Wight. Model made by Steve Hutt. Field trips. A new French Guide. 5 Years on. 1 Issue 2, December 2006 Dinosaur Diaries Issue 2 Introduction Contents Welcome to the second edition of Out of Africa – summer exhibition 3 Dinosaur Diaries, the newsletter Green Island Awards 6 for Dinosaur Isle. Parlez vous Franglais? 7 This issue attempts to give a flavour of some of the things we did in 2006; but we have Education News 8 been so busy that it has been slightly late Experimental Clay Project 10 coming out. If you want to see an article about something we have missed then please contact As seen on TV 12 us. Field Trips 13 Much has happened at Dinosaur Isle since the School find 14 first version of the newsletter appeared. There have been a number of changes to the Displaying local finds? 15 organization we are part of. The Museum The Fox Project 16 Service has gone, and now we are part of the new Isle of Wight Heritage Service. Adverts Then and now – 5 years on 17 for other parts of the Service continue to be Website changes 20 included at the end of this newsletter. Summer visitors 21 A number of television companies have been filming at the museum and on the local beach. Shop News 22 The arrival of the new Prehistoric Park series African Dinosaur Wordsearch 23 on the television may have had something to do with this, but Dinosaurs are always popular News from the I.W. Heritage Service 24 with all ages. Out-of-season schools accommodation 26 Dinosaur Diaries is available free on our Artworks 27 website as a downloadable document. The format is pdf, and it can be accessed from the webpage www.dinosaurisle.com/newsletter.aspx See www.dinosaurisle.com for About us … further information and news about us and what we do. Dinosaur Isle is a museum and visitor attraction - displaying fossils, especially dinosaurs, from the Isle of Wight. As part Produced by of the Isle of Wight Council we are responsible for the ongoing conservation, Dinosaur Isle display and interpretation of a collection of Culver Parade fossils that started life in the early Sandown nineteenth century, and which has been Isle of Wight passed down through the care of PO36 8QA generations of curators. We aim to pass on the collection unharmed to future Editor: Trevor Price generations (enhanced by our own collecting Community Learning Officer. and acquisitions, and those donated by the All articles by TP unless stated otherwise. public). 2 © 2006 Dinosaur Isle, Isle of Wight Council Dinosaur Diaries Issue 2 Out of Africa Dinosaurs of a lost world Summer exhibition 2006 This years summer exhibition is drawing to a close. Did you see it? What was it all about? Each year we put on a themed exhibition which accompanies the existing displays. For 2006 the theme was African dinosaurs. During the 19th Century Africa was an inhospitable and mostly inaccessible continent, with explorers and missionaries suffering incredible privations, hardships, disease and expense to reach and map out new regions. Amongst theses intrepid pioneers were a small number of fossil hunters including Richard Markgraf, Professor Fraas and Dr Werner Janensch who explored Africa just before the First World War. These German fossil hunters found remains of hitherto unknown and exciting large dinosaurs. Of interest to us are three types of African dinosaur; the long necked sauropods, ornithopods like Iguanodon and a large meat eating dinosaur called Spinosaurus. Why? you might ask … well these animals are related to some of the dinosaurs on the Isle of Wight. What makes this unusual is that at the beginning of the Cretaceous (about 125 million years ago) a large And what of next years exhibition? We ocean called the Tethys can say that it is on a different scale and separated Europe from from an entirely different time-zone; and Africa. Fossil evidence that preparations are already underway. from the sea-floor of the Mediterranean shows that Read about it in the next newsletter or these dinosaurs may have on the webpage island-hopped across the www.dinosaurisle.com/exhibition.aspx narrower part of the ocean between Spain and 3 Morocco. For further details please contact Steve Hutt at Dinosaur Isle. Dinosaur Diaries Issue 2 Out of Africa building a sandpit model Most children love making a mess! So this year we made a large sandpit and stocked it with some replicas of Stromer’s Spinosaurus bones. 3) Rubber moulds are made of all of the parts; in this case the finger bones and claws. 1) The first task, after researching published data on the skeleton, is to make some small scale clay models from which to 4) The final items are cast in a hard make the full size items that will go plaster ready to paint. into the pit. 2) Full size replicas are then 5) The finished items are then made in modelling clay. placed into the sandpit ready to be discovered by thousands of eager children (and parents) It is not always the children who get armed with brushes and goggles. carried away in the sandpit; we saw an activity centre organizer having fun getting everyone covered in 4 sand, you know who you are … Photographs supplied by Lora Apps Dinosaur Diaries Issue 2 Out of Africa Last year Steve made a full size mdf cutout of a Tyrannosaurus building a full-size 2D rex that was mounted on the Spinosaurus front of our lab. This gave our visitors some idea of the scale of this fearsome creature. This 1) The first task is to year he decided to create a draw up a plan, and to similar model of a Spinosaurus try out some to show just how much bigger it different colour was than T. rex. schemes 2) Then cut the mdf panels to shape and apply the first coats of paint. 3) An airbrush is used to apply the final colour and camouflage. Photographs supplied by 4) Finally use a ‘cherry-picker’ Lora Apps to place the panels in position. The comparison with T. rex soon becomes apparent, Spinosaurus Keep an eye on our website to see what we have planned for is both taller and longer, but the 2007 Summer Exhibition lacks the powerful, crushing 5 jaws of Tyrannosaurus rex. Dinosaur Diaries Issue 2 Green Island Awards For the second year running Dinosaur Isle was awarded the Gold Standard at the Green Island Award ceremonies at Cowes on the 25th of May 2006. In addition to its Gold Award for meeting strict criteria for its environmental impact Dinosaur Isle was nominated for Attraction of the Year alongside Ventnor Botanical Gardens and Chessel Pottery Barns. Dinosaur Isle and Ventnor Botanical Gardens (the winner) are both currently run by the same part of the Isle of Wight Council thus demonstrating the Council's efforts in reducing its environmental footprint. The awards were presented at the prestigious Cowes Yacht Haven. Peter Pusey (general manager) and Trevor Price (Community Learning Officer) represented the museum at the presentation. Over 90 tourism related businesses are taking part in the scheme and the trend is for this number to increase in future years. For further information why not access the website http://www.greenislandtourism.org 6 Dinosaur Diaries Issue 2 Parlez vous Franglais? It has long been my aim to produce some brief guide leaflets for our overseas visitors. The first of these (a French version) has now been produced, and is available to be downloaded from our website. We will also have a small quantity The process started with my predeces available in printed form at to one of those software translat the museum. result back and tried it stop laughing, telling us it had ob sor submitting some English text or programmes. When we got the French word it could find.on After a visiting th French school teacher he couldn’t from a visiting French family. It sti viously just substituted the nearest of the corruption by the original programme. The auto-translation had pretty well butchered the original teis attempt, we got more comments member of staff who is French. ll wasn’t right because of the extent After much re-writing the leaflet is xt so it was passed to a former now finished; the result is a double-sided A4 colour sheet. The end result could not have been produced without the hard work put ur school has a in by Anne Yvonne Baker to whom I If yo languages department and am extremely grateful. would like to have a go at producing a Dutch or German version then we would like to hear from you. Copies can be downloaded from the webpages www.dinosaurisle.com/info.aspx www.dinosaurisle.com/about_us.aspx (files are in acrobat pdf format). or Dinosaur Diaries Issue 2 7 Education News The 2006 school year started in January with a visit by a local Reception class, followed by a number of visits from an Island secondary school where we were able to provide support for the Evolution component of their GCSE Biology. The remainder of January and February saw the slow build up of visiting schools which peaks each year in June. In February I was asked to go to Sandown Primary School to provide two sessions on Rocks and Soils to their Year 3 classes.