The recently released Dinosaurs app for iPhones from AMNH was well reviewed on Museum Mobile Wiki. I’ve been spending quality time with it on my morning commutes and having a wonderful time reading the Stories section. Six dinosaurs and their discoverers get the full treatment.
Did you know Barnum Brown was a prodigious fossil hunter, discoverer of three T-rex skeletons, an oil prospector and a spy for the US government? Neither did I till I had the app on my phone. I’ve read the label copy on the museum wall before but info didn’t stick until I was holding it in my hands.
One of the things that struck me is the absolutely incongruous reality of looking at a picture of the 80 foot tall Barosaurus on my iPhone, where the image on the screen is all of 1.5 inches tall. It’s mind-bending to comprehend the scale of dinosaurs in this medium unless you already know a lot about them, though the picture of the paleontologist Earl Douglass standing next to a section of the actual backbone can help.
Also, I wrote a comment on the Museum Mobile Wiki about how I wished that, on top of all the other good stuff the app provides, it would hold your place when you had to quit. It does, at least while you’re reading one of the Stories, so I apologize for mis-reporting.
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