Friday, May 22, 2020
Huh? Why didn't you....
There's something fishy about this story.
The skeleton of an extinct 'fish lizard' locked in a glass case over 16ft from the ground for the last 100 years has finally been studied, thanks to a selfie stick on a fishing rod. The 145 million year old Nannopterygius is a species of ichthyosaur, which swam the seas of our planet for about 76 million years. It is on display in the Natural History Museum, London, but its glass cabinet is hung too high for easy examination. Russian palaeontologist Nikolay Zverkov was desperate to see the London specimen as he thought some of the Russian ichthyosaurs might be similar. To photograph and assess the skeleton, Nikolay attached a digital camera on a selfie stick to a fishing rod and connected it to a PC via a very long USB cable. He passed the photos on to University of Portsmouth palaeontologist Megan Jacobs who was working on Ichthyosaurs for her Master's Degree.Clever, but why didn't you just ask the museum for permission to use a ladder? They must have ladders or scaffolds for their own maintenance of those specimens. I'll bet they would even open the glass case for you. Museums enjoy serving real scholars. It's their basic purpose. The tourists just pay the rent.
Labels: Bemusement
¶ 5:31 AM
