UNIVERSITY TO SET UP NEW "DINOSAUR DEPARTMENT" AS POPULARITY GROWS IN OKAYAMA JAPAN

UNIVERSITY TO SET UP NEW "DINOSAUR DEPARTMENT" AS POPULARITY GROWS IN OKAYAMA JAPAN

@Jr_Paku Midin Channel

OKAYAMA

A university in western Japan will establish a department specializing in dinosaur studies beginning next April as the field grows in popularity.

The Okayama University of Science already offers a course on dinosaurs, but plans to increase the number of lectures, opportunities for field work, and professors with the new department, as well as widening research to include areas such as biosciences in addition to geology and paleontology.

"We aim to make it a new educational and research hub in western Japan for studying dinosaurs, and hope to use our strength as a comprehensive science university to advance research," said Mototaka Saneyoshi, an associate professor studying dinosaurs at the university.

The university's Department of Biosphere-Geosphere Science established a course on dinosaurs and paleontology in 2014, taking over a fossil dig project in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia being conducted by a local biotech company.

It has since discovered one of the world's largest dinosaur footprints and developed new age-determination methods.

The university decided to upgrade the course as the number of people applying in recent years has increased to around two to three times the number of places available.

The new department will have places for 45 students, around a 50 percent increase from the original course, as well as eight professors, up from four.

The department will offer opportunities to engage in multifaceted research on dinosaurs, from identifying proteins left within fossils to decoding the sequencing of amino acids, as well as learn about pathological analysis.

The dig in the Gobi Desert is the current course's selling point, with fourth-year undergraduate and graduate students working on theses making up the majority of participants thus far. But third-year undergraduates will also be able to join under the new department.

"We hope to discover new aspects of dinosaur ecology that we would not have been able to discover under the previous course," Saneyoshi said.

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