Kevin's Photoblog

Here are some of the buildings on the rynek (town square/market).  I do not know the purpose of the large and beautiful brick building; a church is of course nearby (Toruń has many churches).

This is a statue of a fiddler on the corner of the square opposite to the Copernicus statue.

This is an old carving of St. Barbara (patron saint of miners and geologists) in the Copernicus Museum.

This is home in which Copernicus was born.  Now a museum, although there is need for exhibits, and plans are in place to build these.

This is Kopernika Ulica (Copernicus Street), which includes th building in which he was likely born.

Copernicus was born of German-speaking parents in the Kingdom of Poland.  He was probably ordained as a catholic priest and served many duties, including being an administrator, doctor and of course one of our most significant scientists.  This is his statue in Toruń; we have previously seen his statue in Warsaw and there is another famous statue in Kraków.  The second picture is a painting of him in the Copernicus Museum in Toruń.

I have gone to a Fulbright conference in Toruń, Poland.  Turuń is the birthplace of Copernicus, who published the first detailed presentation of the Heliocentric (sun-centered) solar system in the year of his death in 1543.  Copernicus is everywhere in Toruń.  Here are the names of the floors at the motel that I stayed at, and the carpet, which has his signature and illustration from his famous book.

Some more naviculopsid skeletons.  These, also from the late Miocene, are unusual as the cross arch, typically in the middle of the skeleton, have here moved closer to the corners.  We are working on the paper on the occurrence of this unusual group, which is from the Eastern Equatorial Pacific.

A couple of SEM photographs of silicoflagellates from the late Miocene (about seven million years ago).  I am working on a paper on the evolution of this simple skeletal morphology over the past 60 million years.

This is the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) that I am using the takes some pictures of silicoflagellate skeletons.