Friday, September 10, 2010

Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic

Thanks to my friend Tim's Elfshot archaeology blog, I have a fantastic zooarchaeology resource to share with you: the Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project.


The site describes itself thusly:

The Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project (VZAP) is a virtual, interactive, osteological reference collection for the study of northern vertebrates. VZAP is a dynamic natural history archive which allows students and researchers to examine the complete skeletal anatomies of multiple bird, mammal, and fish species in both 2D and 3D.
You'll need to download and install the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in for 3D stuff (it's free), and the site doesn't like Firefox very much (so use Safari or, if you must, Explorer), but once you've sorted that out, you're in for a treat.

The collection consists of both 2D and 3D images--the 3D ones will download for viewing in Adobe Acrobat.


It'll be fun to watch this site grow as more and more specimens are added, and I plan to make full use of the foxes and other canids as I (very slowly) work on revising, re-writing and rendering useful my honours thesis from a million years ago (titled North American Canid Osteology).

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Migration

I just migrated this blog from WordPress, not because I don't like WordPress (it seems very nice), but because I can't use Amazon affiliates links in a free WordPress blog, but I can in a free Blogger blog. And I thought you might like to buy some of the books I mention once in a while.

Unfortunately, the comment from Aaron Elkins on the WordPress version of Osteosophy didn't migrate along with the posts. You can see it on the About page (scroll down).