Our Virtual Tours are talked about in an article on The McGill Tribune!
Read all about it here!
Created by Ingrid Birker of the Redpath Museum and Meghomita Das of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, this tour will take you on an exploration of the fossils found in Montreal on and around the campus.
Many thanks to the Department of Canadian Heritage, under the Museums Assistance Program (MAP) for generous funding directly to the Redpath Museum!
We are grateful for this generous allocation of $14,083 to help us carry out our activities until the end of fiscal year 2021.
Many thanks to Anthony Howell and Annie Lussier, both collection managers and curatorial staff at the Redpath Museum, for pulling together and submitting the grant application.
Congratulations to the team of graduate students who have received funding support from McGill Science Outreach and from an NSERC Student Ambassador Award for the development and implementation of a lesson plan to accompany the popular STEMM Diversity @ McGill colouring and activity book! This lesson plan will launch in the Fall semester, and showcase the diversity of science and the scientists who do it.
This summer the McGill Sustainability Projects Fund (SPF) turned ten years old and it marked the occasion by giving the 130 year old Redpath Museum some funding help. Thanks SPF for subsidizing our new outreach project to create a "Museum in a Box" and for help to buy photography equipment so that we could create virtual StoryMap tours such as the McGill Tree Tour and the McGill Stones and fossils tour.
Check here for the launch of both these virtual tours for Homecoming McGill at the end of September.
The Dawson family and McGill have a long and storied connection. Sir John William Dawson, founder of the Museum in 1882 and Principal of McGill for 38 years died in 1899. His great grandaughter Kathleen Godfrey, graduated in 2019 with Masters in Anthropology. You can read about her conservation and social justice work here. On August 10, 2020, Kathleen's grandmother, Joan Harrington, died at the age of 101.
The Hauffiopteryx altera, a new species of Ichthyosaur discovered by a McGill student Dirley Cortés, a PhD candidate in paleontology with Dr. Hans Larsson, Director of the Redpath Museum, has been described iPalaeontologia Electronica, 23(2):a30.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26879/937 here.
New research using the most comprehensive study of feathered dinosaurs and early birds has revised the evolutionary relationships of dinosaurs at the origin of birds.
Henry Reiswig, the former Biology professor and curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Redpath Museum, died on July 4, 2020. You can read his obituary here:
His daughter Amy says: "He died in his lab in the garage, with microscope slides on the warmer, doing what he loved: science."
Hauffiopteryx altera (Latin for different from) has been identified as a new species of Ichthyosaurs by researchers from McGill University and the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in Germany.
Ichthyosaurs (‘fish lizards’), a group of tuna-shaped reptiles that inhabited Earth’s seas during the Mesozoic Era, were discovered by scientists in the early 19th century. Similar to the modern-day dolphin, ichthyosaurs underwent profound adaptions to aquatic environments including limbs transformed into flippers, a dorsal fin, and a tail fin.
The Redpath Museum Society Vice President External, Erin Gibbons, has won the prestigious Vanier Scholarship.
According to Virginie Millien, an assistant professor at McGill and curator of zoology and paleontology at McGill's Redpath Museum, warmer temperatures preferentially benefit one of the Lyme diesease tick's most important hosts, the white-footed mouse, which has expanded its range northwards, and outcompeted other mice. The result is that Lyme disease has become a far more pressing health issue in southeastern Canada than ever before.
Here at the Redpath Museum, we are wishing you good health during this challenging time as we all learn to manage the significant challenges we’ve faced since the COVID-19 pandemic. Through it all, it has become clear that the world needs its museums to educate and connect us to each other.
We need help from all of our Friends to deliver Redpath to you at home!
The McGill 24 Seeds of Change project to create a Virtual Fossil and Dinosaur kit closed at midnight on May 26, 2020, and raised $2,069.78 from 9 donations (including $290 in McGill24 Matching Funds).
Thanks very much for your donations to the Museum during McGill24 to create a:
This campaign finishes on May 25, 2020. With your continued support we can develop and create more e- resources for teachers and children everywhere to learn about the amazing world of Mesozoic dinosaurs, Devonian flora and ancient Ordovician sea life. All from the Redpath Museum!
While smaller dinosaurs needed speed, huge predators like T. rex were optimized for energy-efficient walking, according to a study published in PLOS ONE.
