katy-l-wood:

seimsisk:

katy-l-wood:

Okay, remember a couple months back when I asked y’all how you mentally categorized dinosaurs? Well, the results of all the fantastic feedback you gave me have come to fruition, and I wanted to share the results. 

I asked the question because my day job is making museum grade replica dinosaur (and other assorted critters) fossils. I have also officially taken over all the social media for the division that focuses on teeth, claw, and miniature skull replicas for individual purchase, and I’ve been rebuilding the website as part of that. One of the big things we wanted to address with the website was the category system for our store. We wanted it to be easy to understand not just for professional paleontologists, but for hobbyists as well, which was where your feedback came into play. We came to two conclusions from that feedback:

1. People primarily categorize dinosaurs visually without knowing their official names, or if they do know their names they only know their names in association with a visual of the whole dinosaur. If they just hear the name on its own they may not fully know what dinosaur is being talked about.  

2. People also heavily categorize dinosaurs based on broad famous categories such as carnivore/herbivore, horned, armored, etc. as well as having a few major favorites they always recognize like T. rex. 

So! We decided to do two things. Firstly, each product we offer now features a silhouette of the dinosaur it belonged to, like so:

Here’s all the silhouettes together, just because I spent the last two months on them and I want to show them off:

These silhouettes should hopefully help people understand what they’re looking at and who the fossil belonged to much better than they previously could with just an image of the fossil.

The second thing was redoing the overall category system to hit the major categories people recognize, rather than relying on more scientific names as the previous category system did. Here’s that new category system:

The site should be much more user friendly now, and much easier to navigate so you can find all the cool dino goodies you could ever want! Thank you so much to every person who gave me feedback on that post. There’s a link to our site at the bottom of this post, and if you want to keep up with new products we’re developing and other stuff we’re up to be sure to join our newsletter! The signup is at the bottom of the website.

Also! As part of this new website we are, as of 10/13/2020, officially offering international shipping! 

www.DeepTimeFossils.com

This is a very inspiring science communicatiom post

Why thank you!