See What It’s Like to be a Paleontologist in the Gobi Desert
Aki Watanabe took Google Glass to the Gobi Desert to show people first hand what fossil hunting is like
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Poke fun at Google Glass all you want, but it does do one thing pretty well: capture first person video. Take this one for example, by Aki Watanabe, a student at the American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Graduate School. He took his Glass to the Gobi Desert to show people first hand what fossil hunting is like.
The video includes a bridge crossing hampered by a herd of goats, lots of dusty driving and some beautiful shots of the Gobi desert landscape.
Since 1990, scientists from the American Museum of Natural History have traveled to Mongolia's vast Gobi Desert each summer in search of fossils, continuing a tradition of Museum expeditions to the region that began in the 1920s. In 1993, Musuem researchers working with Mongolian scientists uncovered one of the richest fossil beds ever found: Ukhaa Tolgod. The site produced hundreds of dinosaur, lizard, and mammal fossils from the Cretaceous period.
Watanabe and the Museum have made a whole series of these Google Glass videos, chronicling their trip and research. Here’s one where Watanabe explains how to prepare a fossil:
And here’s another showing Watanabe packing for a trip to Mongolia to look for fossils there:
These videos might not be quite as good as going on a dig yourself, but they gets the point across. And keep you way cleaner.
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