Have Bones Will Travel

Stepping out into the well tested waters of crowd funding for science. It's at least well tested for others, I have never done it. But, as part of the indiegogo project, I wanted to attach it to this blog as well as the Paleo Porch facebook page.

When I was working in the Vertebrate Paleontology Lab at Lamar University we had a collection of replicas and fossils that we could take to the local elementary classrooms to give a little workshop. Now that I am no longer there, I do not have access to the lab or the collection, so I have decided to collect my own and start again. That is where the appeal for donations comes in.

I actually starter with Kickstarter to, well, kickstart this collection. After going through all the motions to get it activated they rejected the idea. They said the projects that have a proven track record are more likely to get funded. Here I had the definition of a kickstart all wrong. After working on things throughout the summer I decided to try again with an indiegogo attempt.

As part of the transparency pledge and group involvement, I will be sharing all the purchases and all the  talks that I do on here as well as on the facebook page. I have high expectations for what I will be able to do with this little traveling museum. Mainly I will focus on giving talks at local schools during the school year, and working with public libraries during the summers.

My hope is that this will not be just located to within a few hours drive time of where we live. That might require a little more work. Since we now live in Oklahoma, I have a base of students and schools up here to work with. But, we still have family in Texas that we will end up visiting at one time or another, and I will always have my stuff with us when traveling.

My wife and I have also thought about taking them with us when we go on vacation. If we do go somewhere for a few days, as soon as we hit where we would stay we would contact the local library, or similar public foray and see if we would be able to set up there near the end of our trip. So, on paper it looks like the gift that keeps on giving (maybe).

I don't expect any really large donations, but a lot of a few dollars at a time. The perks aren't anything greatly spectacular, but they are part of what makes us, well, us. Above you see our logo, that will be on the magnet and the T-shirt. Below is the logo icon that will be on the stickers.

Finally, the real payoff for doing stuff like this is getting science into the hands of school kids that may never get the opportunity to go to a museum. Coming from a small school, I know how big of an ordeal it was to even plan a trip to the Natural History Museum. Sharing the wonders of science, and the history of science with kids, just may keep them interested in science. If it doesn't do anything else, it might help kids to think beyond their little community and ask more questions. 

Turns out the kids are usually really grateful that you took the time to share this stuff with them. I will wrap up here and share just a small smackeral sampling of the "Thank You" letters I have received in the past from giving these talks. As I get more I will share them as part of the posts to let everyone who has been gracious enough to support this project now that the have helped make a difference or at least an impact on some child's education. 

and, just as the letters attest, Thank You for stopping by, taking the time to read, and possibly helping fund such an endeavor. If you are interested in helping me out, or just want to know more, please check  out my Indiegogo project and see what it's all about. Please donate and spread the word. 

Let's go out on the porch.

    I grew up in the South. Technically I still live in the South I suppose. There are things that happen down here that are alien to most other folks. Porches are one. I have seen sunrooms in the north, and for good reason, sometimes it is just too cold to be outside up there. Porches, well if there isn't a subset study on Porch Culture there should be. Most of the summer is spent on the porch for the practical reason that it is far too hot inside to live. It looks like I keep creating new blogs instead of creating new posts. This is a holdover from my life with journals and an unadmitted battle with OCD. I have carried journals for as long as I can remember, but I hate having thoughts and topics arranged in places they don't go together. I don't want to talk about fossils or extinct animals over at The Platypus and the Dodo, but it is still an important part of my daily news intake as well as my research. So instead up random incoherentness on one blog I have decided to have random incoherentness on 3. I also write Life's Marginalia to capture all the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere and never had enough to put together a theme.

This is also a joint venture with something I have had the opportunity to do while at the University of Oklahoma--internet radio. The good folks at The Wire have given the Graduate College a two hour slot to discuss everything that is going on with our Graduate Student Life. Currently our slot is from 9:00am to 11:00 am every Thursday. I have the first hour to myself to discuss science news and research. After working solo for a couple of weeks it became apparent that most of the shows ended with a talk about paleontological endeavors. After talking to a few people after the last show, I realized that these were exactly like the stories I heard from my grandparents and their friends while sitting on the porches at their houses. Well, not exactly, there wasn't much talk about fossils, unless a find was announcement in National Geographic.

For the facebook inclined you can like Paleo Porch there too. I upload paleontology related news, photos, threads, or profiles that may be of interest to paleo-nerds. Hopefully this will start to balance out the heavily skewed dinosaur groupie-ism that is so rampant. I will post dino stuff, but mostly focus on the non dinosaurs--pterosaurs, aquatic reptiles, and mammals. I will just hold out until this idea is picked up by PBS or BBC. I would even settle for a kids show. Something needs to give the giant mammals some screen time, after all the Dinosaur Train doesn't stop in the Eocene.

The plan is to overview and summate the goings on each week in the word of paleontology. In addition to the new and noteworthy, I will try to shed some light on historical connections either with the finds, the paleontologists that discovered them, or the localities where they are digging. By updating every week, I will not only be able to keep abreast of all the goings on in the world of paleo, but also give a little more coherence to the show. Please click on The Wire to stream our show as well as others ( I have no idea what some of them are or when, so join at your own risk. There is also streaming video if you just want to see what is going on in the studio. Same link, just click on "video.") I will also upload the media file on facebook hosted through dropbox downloads in case you want to have a sorta amateur podcasts to listen to later.

If anyone has any questions or ideas for topics, leave them here in the comments, or send them to me on facebook. I live with this stuff and take it for granted that many people know more about the backstories of famous fossils than might actually be the case. Welcome aboard, come up and sit a spell. If you are really lucky, you will be able to say that you followed the Paleo Porch blog from the beginning and feel a closer connection as I start a lifetime of hosting the Paleo Porch show. Enjoy They Might Be Giants--they sing about this too.