EXPERIENCED EDUCATORS
Wayne Haglund, professor emeritus who taught for 40 years at Mount Royal University, chats with a visitor at the opening of the school’s exhibit, Cretaceous Lands. Featuring three life-size, fossil casts of creatures that roamed North America 65 million years ago, the display is open to the public and is used as a learning tool for students.
“Just look at their faces — they are utterly fascinated.”
On Thursday morning, Wayne Haglund is indulging in one of his favourite pastimes, observing youngsters as they explore something new and, most important, educational.
“I’m a grandfather of 13 and a great-grandfather of three,” he says with a chuckle, “so I have a lot of experience watching kids.”
He also has a lot of experience as a passionate educator. He taught at Mount Royal University for 40 years, before retiring in 2004. Yet the pull of education is still strong; most days you can find the professor emeritus on campus, having coffee with former colleagues, dreaming up something new and exciting for his faculty.
This day, though, is a most special one, and one in which Haglund is in the spotlight, for a new exhibit at the school entitled Cretaceous Lands.
The only display of its kind in Calgary, it features three lifesized, fossil casts of two dinosaurs and a marsupial, creatures that were alive and breathing 65 million years ago on the land today known as North America.
Also on hand for the unveiling of the exhibit — which will complement the Cretaceous Seas display that took up residence here in 2015 — is MRU’s president David Docherty and Jonathan Withey, dean of its faculty of science and technology.
To describe the two school leaders as upbeat is an understatement: Docherty hails the new display as in keeping with his conviction that a university’s hallways should be “a museum, or a laboratory, or a teaching moment;” Withey believes it will not only provide a conduit between the school and the greater community but that it will also inspire “a sense of natural history which goes beyond the formal education programs we offer.”
While it’s dwarfed by the offerings at the Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, the new display, combined with the Cretaceous Seas display (which Haglund also played an instrumental role in developing), is impressive. It includes a Nanotyrannus lancensis, thought to be a juvenile version of the wildly popular Tyrannosaurus rex; the Triceratops horridus represents the herbivore segment of the dinosaur world, while the Didelphodon vorax, an early marsupial, is a nod to the early mammals that would eventually take over.
The same experts whose work can be found at the Tyrell, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, Japan, created the fossil casts.
The display, on a second floor near the university’s East Gate entrance, is open to the public, but it will also be used as a teaching tool for its students.
“You sit in class and learn about all the specimens, but to actually see it, their full body and how they stand, is very interesting,” says fourth-year geology student Daniella Pietrocarlo. “I think it helps you to learn, it engages you. Part of the reason why I love dinosaurs is that I went to the Tyrell museum a lot as a kid.”
Haglund says it was a childhood experience that also put him firmly on the path to teaching in the fields of geology and paleontology, as well as the history and philosophy of science.
“I went along on a field trip with my friend’s mother, who was a teacher,” he says of his early days in Oregon. “We were looking at fossils and it was so interesting.”
For Haglund — who, along with the provincial government and other supporters, helped make Cretaceous Lands possible — the display may be relatively small, but it’s nothing less than spectacular.
“Now there’s a place right here in the city where parents can bring their kids to see a dinosaur,” says the man who says being around young people keeps him feeling young and excited about his life’s work.
“I plan to pull up a chair every day for the next couple of weeks,” he says with a wide smile, “and watch the kids as they come and experience these great creatures. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”