Mira Thompson

@wensthomp.bsky.social

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Vertebrate Palaeontology + Sedimentology PhD Candidate at University of Manitoba. Thompsonite. She/her🏳️‍⚧️

Mira sitting and smiling because its her birthday and it was very nice weather outside.
List of bird species Mira saw form her apartment balcony this morning. List is as follows: 3 Chimeny Swifts, 1 Gray Catbird, 2 Swainsons thrushes, 1 American Robin, 5 House Sparrows, 3 Chipping Sparrows, 4 Tennessee warblers, 2 Nashville Warblers, 1 Magnolia Warbler, 1 Bay-breasted warbler, 1 Blackburnian warbler, 1 Northern Yellow Warbler, 2 Chestnut Sided warblers, 4 Blackpoll warblers, 1 Palm Warbler, 1 yellow rumped warbler, and 1 Rose Breasted Grosbeak.
Chestnut Sided Warbler sitting on a wooded deck. It's mouth is agape for some reason.
Figure from Mallon 2019, please see that paper for full description. A bar graph like figure where each bar is topped by a dinosaur skull demonstrating each species it represents the stratigraphic range of. Notably, Centrosaurus does not overlap with Styracosaurus stratigraphically, not does Corythosaurus with Prosaurolophus. This species turnover is around 30 m above the base of the Dinosaur Park Formation, which coincidentally is where the Plateau Tuff bentonite appears to be stratigraphically in most but not all places in the Park.
Nine stratigraphic sections from Dinosaur Provincial Park. Most rock shown is either yellow for sandstone or grey for mudstone. A green line is shown connecting the Plateau Tuff, which was correlated over a distance of 12 km after identifying it through geochemical methods. See Thompson et al. 2026 for the full figure description.
Scatter plot of many different shaped and coloured dots showing differences in Magnesium, Iron, Aluminum, and Titanium content in biotites from bentonite beds in Dinosaur Provincial Park. Main takeaways are that the Plateau Tuff bentonite biotites are very high in iron, bearpaw bentonties very low in iron, and the Steveville Lower Bentonite has a unqiue Titanium enrichment. Unfortunately, alt text will not allow for a full description, so please read the figure caption from Thompson et al. 2026.
On the left, a simplified stratigraphic section showing the Dinosaur Park Formation and how it is older than the Bearpaw Formation and younger than the Oldman Formation. On the right, a zoomed in look at the Dinosaur Park Formation showing placement of dated bentonites and the transition from sandy to muddy sections up stream. Please read Thompson et al. 2026 for more detailed figure description.
Map of where Dinosaur Provincial Park is in Alberta, Canada. It is approximately 200 km east of Calgary (left side of map as a black square) and appears on the map as a yellow polygon based on the Park's boundaries.
Mira standing to the left of CSVP president Dr. Danielle Fraser from the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
Letter to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology advocating that their annual meeting have an online option in addition to the in person meeting in Cleveland. Unfortunately, alt text cannot have all of the letter text but the reasoning involves threatof violence to at risk groups in the US as well as issues related to contracting dangerous diseases and other safety threats.
A skeleton of the Dinosaur Corythosaurus intermedius, left in the rocks it was found in. The photo views it from the spine. The head and neck are tucked and twisted under the body. The bones are a brown colour, contrasting with the pale gray sandstone. A white plastic cut out of the skull leans against the wall of the building the skeleton is found in.
Me looking at a black tree monitor in its enclosure. The monitor is looking right at my smiling face while bracing itself on the enclosure glass with it's front legs.
Picture of the front of a Tyrannosaur rex skull. Specifically, the skull of the Black Beauty specimen at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, named so because the fossils have a unique black colour. The skull is held up by steel bars. The left side of the skull (right side of the photo) is more flat than the other side due to the fossil being compressed in one direction after burial. This makes the skull have a bit of a crooked smile.
Museum display showing a model of the Cambria marine arthropod Stanleycaris to the left of the original fossil. The fossil is in a slab of flat tan mudstone. The model is sandy coloured with large sphere shaped black eyes and two strange clawed mouth parts. The display is set up on terraced pale coliured plywood. The exhibit text reads as follows: Stanleycaris hirpex had a third eye in the middle of its head. Similar to modern dragonflies, this extra eye may have helped it to stay oriented while swimming fast, while the pair of stalked, multi-faceted eyes provided a more detailed view of the surroundings. ROMIP 68665. 3D model artists: Sabrina Cappelli/Mira Thompson.
Picture of Mira's smiling face when she won her award.
Picture of the river bank of the Burtwood River im Manitoba. It is summer, so the rocky bank is populated by green grass and brush and bordered by boreal forest. The weather is bright and only a little cloudy.
Picture of a woman wearing blue parka with black fur trim on the hood and holding a whiskey jack (also known as gray jay) bird on her outstretched hand. It is winter and there is about a foot of snow on the ground on this wooded trail behind the woman and bird.
Picture taken at the banks of a river where my two dogs play. On the left is my golden retriever when she was young, standing in the river soaking wet and taunting my other dog on the shore. The dog on the shore is a black lab puppy, about 4 months old, rearing back playfully with a tennis ball I his mouth
Picture of a black spruce forest just beyond a field of yellowing grass on a cloudy day.
Picture of the skeleton of Borealopelta markmitchelli, an armored dinosaur. The photo is taken from the left side of the skeleton,which is lying on its stomach. The skeleton preserves the impressive armor and spines that adorned the animals back, as well as skin.
Picture of a claw from a dromaeosaur (raptor). The claw is laying on a piece of paper towel and is about 6 cm long. It is curved, brown in colour, and broken cleanly in 3 spots.
Picture of a tyrannosaur tooth fossil held in my left hand. The tooth is brown, curves to the right, has a steak knife like serrated edge, and a worn down tip.
Picture of a bird called a ruby crowned kinglet sitting on a tree branch in front if a brown wooden fence. The kinglet is small, round bodied, yellowish brown with a lighter belly and a distinctive bright red spot on top of its head. It is looking at the camera curiously.
Figure showing tiny fossils of single called organisms called Foraminifera, all to scale with eachother and placed on a black background for ease of visualization. Several have spiral shapes, others are more cone or cylinder shaped. They all are made of multiple small chambers.
Picture of the fossil of the largest trilobte, Isotelus rex, placed in the middle of the photo and laying on it's feet. It is beige coloured with the head plate being a dark brown. A hand is seen in the foreground on the right for scale, being about the size of half the trilobites head.
A plant fossil preserved as a carbon imprint in grey mudstone is being held by my leather gloved hand between my thumb and index finger. The leaves are thin and numerous, similar to a modern redwood tree.
Picture of myself standing I front of beige coloured sandstone rock outcrops in Dinosaur Provincial Park.