Woodruff represents PC in Japan

Cary Woodruff, Director of Paleontology at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum traveled 5,765 miles around the world to Mifune, Japan to share insight on the dinosaur world in Northeastern Montana.

The Mifune Dinosaur Museum was the site of the 2017 Evolution of Dinosaurs in Asia and North America Symposium on Thursday, March 17 - Sunday, March 19. The event hosted 100 attendees.

"It was another great opportunity to be able to showcase and talk about Montana's dinosaur record," Woodruff said. "It was a neat way to see how another small museum was able to build a relationship with other museums internationally."

Woodruff was one of three North American Paleontologists to attend the event. Woodruff and his American cohorts did not have to take a crash course in Japanese to lecture at the event, rather the event provided translators.

"We would say a few lines and then the translators would translate it to the audience," Woodruff said. "It was a really cool symposium and it was a really cool opportunity."

According to Woodruff, several years ago the Mifune Dinosaur Museum had developed a relationship with the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.

"They would do research and all sorts of activities together," Woodruff said. "Part of that partnership has been bringing fossils that were collected in Montana over to Japan. That way the people in the lab could clean the fossils and we could research them faster and show them off to a wider audience."

This year's conference was a continuation of those former meetings in which paleontologists from Asia and North America would meet, share and compare findings of American and Asian dinosaurs.

"It was really cool just being able to talk to visitors," Woodruff said. "They could come and see and learn about dinosaurs from all over the world."

Woodruff and John Scannella, an Interim Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, shared their insights from Montana dinosaur fossils.

"John works on horned dinosaurs like triceratops and I work on long-necked plant eating dinosaurs called sauropods," Woodruff said. "We have a lot of triceratops in Montana and we also have a lot of sauropods in Montana."

The sauropod currently held at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, is Ralph, who was found in Central Montana in 2005.

"What was really nice was that John and I could talk about our areas of specialty, the dinosaur groups we focus on but with a really heavy Montana emphasis," Woodruff said.

Though Ralph is quite the find, Woodruff's lecture focused more on sauropod findings that he found in another region of the state.

"It mostly focused on work that I have done in conjunction with collecting sauropods for the Museum of the Rockies," he said. "But I definitely did mention Ralph because where we found Ralph we don't have any sauropods further north in all of North America. So when we are talking about the distribution of sauropods in North America, Ralph is a really important specimen to talk about."

Woodruff's lecture as well as others did net some feedback from those in attendance.

"I think they were all pretty well received," he said. "They had question and answers sessions afterwards and I got a lot of great questions from the audience, which was kids and adults of all ages. I think all of the talks were very well received and well attended."

Mifune was similar to Malta in terms of its remoteness from larger cities.

"The Mifune Museum is actually a small regional museum," Woodruff said. "It was really neat to see the audience there because it wasn't just the locals. It consisted of people who had traveled from all over the country to come. Mifune is very much like Malta, a small farming community. Some people might say Malta is in the middle of nowhere Montana and Mifune is in the middle of nowhere Japan."

Woodruff was able to make several connections with other museums and paleontologists at the event.

"I made a lot of new friendships and I think the Malta museum will be able to do a lot of neat stuff in the future with museums over in Japan," Woodruff said.