Early Paleontology & The Crystal Park

 

YouTube is a great place to learn new things and one channel I look for videos to inform me is call The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered. They published a video on October 9, 2020 called The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs and Early Paleontology.

The video covers the origins of paleontology in Europe. He then covers dinosaur (and other ancient creatures) exhibits at The Crystal Park (moved from the 1851 The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations) at Bromley, London, England in 1854.The park still exists today though parts are in disrepair. A group called the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs exists to help protect and restore this piece of history.

University College London produces a series called Lunch Hour Lectures. They hosted Professor Joe Cain in June 2013 discussing the park and it's dinosaurs models. Video link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPhm4Lw538U&feature=emb_logo

Image at beginning of post taken from Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park by Samuel Phillips (1814-1854) 4th Ed. Illustrated by Philip Henry Delamotte(1821-1889), published by Bradbury and Evans, London 1855. The sculptures on the island were created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894).

Louisville Waterway Protection Tunnel Borer Journey Completed

 

Back on September 9, 2019 I wrote about Louisville Metro Sewer District (MSD) Waterway Protection Tunnel project and its exhibit that I helped contribute to at the Kentucky Science Center. Well, the boring machine (aka Bumblebee) has completed it journey of about 4 miles under the city. It breached the wall of its extraction hole on September 30, 2020 near Lexington Road and Grinstead Drive. The journey took about 20 months and removed more than 625,000 tons of material. 

Congratulations to MSD, Black & Veatch Construction, and J.F. Shea Contruction, Inc. for getting to this important milestone in the tunnel project. The full project should be completed sometime in 2021.

See the WHAS 11 news story at this YouTube page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBXMc257UlQ or see it on the viewer window below.

MSD released a video of the event on YouTube as well at this page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvgHSKm4rUA&feature=emb_logo or look at viewer below.

Darwin's Fossil Sand Dollar at Harvard

 

After watching more videos from the The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) YouTube channel. I found another interesting one to highlight. It was created 2019 for the Specimen Spotlight Wednesday presentation May 25-31 meeting. The presenter was Jessica D. Cundiff of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Echinarachnius juliensis (Desor, 1847) was collected in Port St. Julien, Patagonia, Argentina during the HMS Beagle voyage (1831-1836) by Charles Darwin in 1834. Darwin sent the echinoid to Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz who also started the MCZ in 1859..  Described by Pierre Jean Édouard Desor in France Geological Society Bulletin vol. 4, number 2, pp. 287-288 in 1847. It appears this fossil is from the Neogene Period (aka Late Tertiary).

Learn the more about this story by watching the video in the player below or go to the YouTube link.

Link to video is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhOOU3eqyG8

Images used for this post:

Portrait of Charles Darwin by George Richmond (1809-1896) water-colour from 1840. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer. 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Darwin_by_G._Richmond.jpg

Image of Louis Agassiz circa 1870 from Schweizerischer Beobachter,14/2011, p. 36This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer. 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Louis_Agassiz_1870.jpg

Image of Pierre Jean Édouard Desor from 1863. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer. 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pierre_Jean_%C3%89douard_Desor.jpg