LITERATURE + LECTURES

The Houston Museum of Natural Science presents an HMNS Special Lecture entitled Caravans from Deep Time: Fossil Wonders from the Silk Road, Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - 06:30 PM.

For centuries, long lines of camels carried textiles, foods and all manner of luxury goods between the Far East, the Mediterranean and Europe. But there were other riches to found along the Silk Road—petrified history. The plateaus and deserts of western China offer spectacular fossil beds that fill gaps in our history of life. The earliest vertebrates and strangely armored fish can be dug from Gobi desert strata.

Fossil remnants in what is now wild scrubland there show us how our mammal ancestors once fought with dinosaur clans for supremacy in forest and meadow. The last phases of the Darwinian drama are superbly represented by the Hipparion hordes—multitudes of “hippo-rhinos” and “moose-giraffes”—and eventually, the first members of our own human kin. Fossils from the Silk Road are now essential chapters in the half-billion-year saga of how the world was shaped.

Join Robert T. Bakker, Ph.D, (pictured) curator of paleontology for the Houston Museum of Natural Science, for an entertaining overview of important Silk Road fossils. Bakker’s engaging presentations are enjoyed by both children and adults.

Sponsored by KUHF, 88.7 FM.  Lecture is in conjunction with the exhibition Secrets of the Silk Road, on view 8/27/10 through 1/2/11.