"interesting" work

work overall has been going pretty good. in fact people of the innerweb, i lie. work has been going amazing!

i have way more responsibility then i typically did at the tyrrell (well other then when i worked with the kids of badlands science camp). guarding the whole otago museum is a pretty big deal! i've been treating it like such too...

so much so that i haven't been wandering around the place while on shift. from the balconies in the main lobby i can see the entrances to ALL the galleries. meaning that if i stay in the lobby watching all the floors and entrances to their galleries nothing can get in OR out without me knowing...

this strategy has left the majority of the building a mystery to me though... which i have to admit is a little weird... i knew the inside of the royal tyrrell inside and out by heart well before i started working there (but then again i did also growup with two guys who worked there...)

my supervisor was a tad bit concerned when she learned of my unfamiliarity with the building... oh right people of the world wide web i haven't introduced you to my boss have i!... how rude of me... this is her here... ms. rhonwyn. she's in charge of specimen and display management, which includes us security guards.

as i was saying last night she was a tad bit concerned when she learning of my unfamiliarity with the building.

"traumador you can't keep an eye on things you haven't seen before," she stated.

oh man! i didn't want to get into trouble at work already!

i tried to explain the logic behind why i didn't leave the lobby...

ms. rhonwyn well she just laughed at me... oh boy. that wasn't good. i just knew it. everytime humans laugh at me they do mean things or bad stuff happens... i didn't want to get fired!!!

"i can see that being one good way of keeping guard," she chuckled. "but traumador the museum typically isn't under siege every night." she paused. "granted it can have 'interesting' bouts now and then."

what did she mean by " 'interesting' ", and why did she raise her hands to her head like that, and make the the quoting sign?

"i want you to try something a little different here tonight traum," she went on. "instead of standing in the lobby the whole night, i want you to take some time, whether it be all together or separate, and explore at least one gallery a night. till you have a feel for the layout of the place."

that didn't sound too hard i figured. take in one bit of the museum, AND still do a good job. i was really starting to like my job!

as ms. rhonwyn started to head out to go home, she stopped abruptly. "oh but do be careful when you take that time to explore that you write down which part of the museum you're in," she instructed "just in case something, odd, were to happen to you, so we know where to look for you."

what?

well for the first 3 hours after ms. rhonwyn, and the other museum staff left i stood guard vigilantly in the lobby like always. however i have to admit i was starting to get bored of standing there with nothing happening...

so i grabbed one of the maps of the museum and decided i'd check out the nature gallery first. cause nature is cool!

writing a quick note of where i was going to be... not sure what could happen to me though?... but i won't argue with the boss... i think they know best... don't they?

so i headed up to the third floor to check out the nature gallery...

now i'd been in the entrance to this gallery before, but what i was going to find going all the way in was going to blow me away...

right after the sperm whale jaw was a fossil. not just any fossil mind you. it was a shark-toothed dolphin skull, just like the one i'd seen at the geo museum at hogwarts tower at the university...

was it weird that i was creeped out by this?... i mean not only was it the first fossil i ran into at that museum too... but it from my somewhat extensive experience working around fossils looked like the exact same skull... now it could have been a cast (that is an exact copy of the fossil... not the cast you put on a broken bone), but i was a little suspicious considering the magical nature of the geo museum...

putting that suspicion on hold... for now... as i was in the otago museum i figured i should keep exploring. especially since ms. rhonwyn was expecting me to do so...

i had no idea that the otago museum was home to so many fossils!

they had a whole mini gallery in the nature hall full of nothing but an extinct bird species known as a moa...

they had almost as many moas as the tyrrell has dinosaurs!!!

now as i didn't want to leave the lobby unguarded too long i decided i could check out this moa corner more in depth another time...

thus far the fossils had all been from eras well after the time of the dinosaurs, and much closer to that of the present (and into mammals rule of earth...). though i knew that the south island of new zealand didn't have any dinosaurs of it's own due to my research at the university of calgary with my friend micheal i hadn't really paid attention to the details in those readings.

you see i thought that meant there were no left over bits of critters from my own era...

man was i wrong! they had a whole section of marine reptiles... marine reptiles didn't really occur any other time then that of the dinosaurs (well other then sea turtles... which managed to survive the extinction 65 million years ago... lucky ducks!)...

now don't get me wrong. i actually love marine reptiles. i think their really cool. we have a bunch of them back in canada too... i just hadn't expected to run into any here in dunedin. that alone here at my new job...

this here is the crown jewel of the fossil gallery. a next complete plesiosaur... which also happens to be the LARGEST fossil thus far discovered within new zealand. north or south island. here we were sharing the same museum...

with a key difference. she is a display specimen that the public comes to see. me i'm just a lowly security guard (hopefully for just right now...). i didn't want to see her response to finding out that a dinosaur had moved in on her saurian free mesozoic gallery...

fortunately she was asleep when i came across her. so that will be a meeting that can wait for another day. phew...

this gallery wasn't done with the surprises though... turning around i nearly screamed at the sight of a whole HERD of dinosaurs running behind me! fortunately for all concerned (especially those hypsilophodonts) they weren't real dinosaurs... rather just a painting of some...

man oh man... i'm not sure my brain the size of a peanut could have stood finding out that all that hard work i put in with micheal at the UoC library was wrong about there being no dinosaurs on the south island!

the display was talking about the dinosaurs found up on the north island. i might have to go pay a visit sometime. it can wait though. after all my run ins with dinos since my being laid off from the tyrrell i wasn't ready to risk the typical rude reception i'd been getting from them lately.

finishing off this tour of discovery i found yet another tyrrell like shocker... this time a reminder of the cause of my problems (and all surviving dinosaurs really). the mass extinction display...

now we had one of these at the tyrrell too, and it was a spot of some contention between us dinosaurs who worked there and human management. to humans this is just a factual event that warrants some curiosity and wonder. to us dinosaurs this is, well, kinda the BIGGEST event ever.

not only did it significantly change our culture and history forever, the extinction did kind of destroy the majority of our population (well okay of those species who hadn't gone extinct prior to the extinction... when you're around for 125 million years you can't help but expect evolution and selective pressures to take their toll a bit... but those species whose day in the sun it was had the sun set a bit early as a result in any case!)...

with that in mind you can kind of understand why we dinosaurs don't really like huge displays on the subject.

here was one starring me right in the face. even more so was a picture a tyrannosaur standing in the foreground (with some sauropods oddly enough... we t-rexs never did live anywhere near or when a sauropod did...). yet another reminder that me and my species had our reign as king of the dinosaurs so prematurely ended, and that if not for the heroic sacrifice of my mother during the extinction (the sacrifice that caused her fossilization i'll point out!) i too would have met a premature ending...

this was a little more then i wished to see, and i decided i'd call an end to my exploration for now. i made a note in my mind that i'd have to avoid this section of the nature gallery from now on (just like we dinos avoided the tyrrell's extinction display back in drumheller).

resuming watch i can say that beyond that shocking ending to my exploration the night went smoothly.

now i can see what ms. rhonwyn means by "interesting"