Smithsonian X 3D Beta Web Site

I am excited to see this web site created by the United States premier museum. Museum collections tend to be vast and hard to show to the general public. So many specimens are kept in storage and probably hardly seen even by researchers and curators.  3D technology and the Internet have a way of unlocking these collections for a large segment of the population to share in the wonders of all these artifacts. Go to their web site at http://3d.si.edu/ to check it out! As of this writing they have 20 models to view including 3 whale fossils and a mammoth.

In order to view the Smithsonian X 3D Beta site your browser needs to support WebGL. As of this writing Google Chrome (version 30+) and Firefox (version 24+) can be used. Internet Explorer 11 when released should work. Apple Safari needs to have its default setting change to Enable WebGL. Apple iOS does not support WebGL right now.

The interface is smooth and rotation allowed with 3 axis rotation. It says powered by Autodesk and the software reminds me of using the Autodesk Maya program.

Below are some links to their YouTube videos describing the system.

500,000 Page View for Blog

Blogger.com, a web service that is part of Google, showed me a message today that my blog had passed over the half a million page view mark. For a fossil blog, that seems to be a pretty good accomplishment. Other metrics like the one I get from Google Analytics show a much lower number but I am not sure when I activated that service to track Internet activity. I do not think it can track if the viewer who does not have Javascript active so that makes the count smaller.

So I hope to keep plodding along posting fossil images and interesting geology information to the Internet using this blog.

Cheers!

Fossils at The Dallas Arboretum

In March 2012, I was contacted by the landscape architectural firm MKW + Associates, LLC (Rutherford, New Jersey) about using some the fossil images on my blog to be used for new educational exhibit at The Dallas Arboretum in Texas. This new area would be called Rory Meyers Children's Adventure Garden. It sounded like a great educational use for some of the fossil images for this non-profit organization so I granted them permission to use the pictures for free.

The pictures images are engraved on granite slabs representing 12 geographic times. The fossils they requested to use are a Waldron Shale Fardenia brachiopod to represent the Silurian, St. Clair, Pennsylvania fern fossil to represent the Carboniferous, and a Green River Wyoming fish fossil to represent Tertiary.

On September 21, 2013, the new 8 acre garden was opened to the general public. It has 150 displays contained in 17 inside and outside galleries. As you can see in the following pictures, the fossils where placed on the walkway. Hopefully it will have many visitors to learn and marvel at the ancient beauty of these creatures images. Quite a few people visit The Dallas Arboretum with attendance over 660,000 visitors a year (according to a 2011 economic study).

Thanks to MKW + Associates, LLC for letting me use their pictures of the Dallas site for this blog posting.
They can be reached at: http://www.mkwla.com/

Fossil images used in the sidewalk can be seen at this postings:
http://louisvillefossils.blogspot.com/2009/11/green-river-fossil-fish.html
http://louisvillefossils.blogspot.com/2011/03/fardenia-subplana-brachiopod.html
http://louisvillefossils.blogspot.com/2010/04/st-clair-pennsylvania-fern-fossils.html

Thanks to Dave at http://viewsofthemahantango.blogspot.com/ blog for the fern fossil.
Thanks to my cousin Kenny for the photograph of the fish fossil he painstakingly prepared.