A new group of exciting science projects has launched on Petridish.org, offering opportunities for backers to help make important discoveries and receive fun rewards! Now, anybody can be a part of science history by backing a worthy project.
With our latest batch of projects you can receive a:
- A cast replica of a fossil
- An invitation to join an excavation
- A personally tagged shark, tracked online for you
- A handmade drum from Africa
- Postcards, T-shirts, prints and much more!
The new projects are:
Saving fossil whales in Virginia
By: Alton Dooley (Virginia Museum of Natural History)
The sediments at Virginia’s Carmel Church Quarry have yielded over 50 fossil species, including whales, sharks, turtles, crocodiles, sea cows, and land animals. We are trying to save these remains before they’re lost to erosion.
The language of wild bonobos
By: Isaac Schamberg (University of Pennsylvania)
Bonobos are our closet living relatives, but we know almost nothing about how they communicate. The research here aims to decode their vocalizations in order begin to unravel the mystery of the evolution of human language.
The Quail Diaries: Seeking The Origin of Callipepla
By: Jennifer Calkins (Evergreen State College)
When the environment changes, why do some species survive and others vanish? We seek answers to this question in the past and present traces left by the four closely related members of the charismatic Callipepla quail.
By: Neil Hammerschlag (University of Miami)
Sharks are one of the most feared, yet imperiled creatures on our planet. We plan to tag and track sharks with satellite tags to identify their ‘hot spots’ for mating, feeding, and pupping, and to protect them at these sites.
By: Todd Steury (Auburn University)
We plan to use bomb-detection dogs, trained to find new-born deer fawns, to determine how prey hide their scent from predators.
Understanding and saving poison frogs
By: Justin Yeager (Tulane University)
The purpose of this study is to integrate hot research topics in evolutionary biology, with the goal of better conserving a beautiful species of poison frog.
Check out one of our exciting new projects and become a backer today!
About Petridish
Petridish.org was founded to help researchers raise money for important and interesting research projects. In the current environment, funding for science and research is increasingly hard to come by; yet, basic discovery, research and innovation are more important than ever to society.
On Petridish, researchers post materials about themselves and their research, and the public can discover projects that are exciting to them. In exchange for contributing to the project, backers receive insider updates on the research, naming rights to new discoveries, and other exciting souvenirs from the work. Now anybody can be a part of science history and contribute to a new discovery.
You can learn more about us, and back or post a project at http://www.petridish.org
Oh, this is so exciting!! I’m glad there’s a project paying attention to the sharks! I love them so much (I blame JAWS for all the negative media hype!) and it’s important that we protect them! That one is definitely my favorite, so to speak, in the sens of me being the most excited about it.