In September 2022, Lynne Quick, senior researcher at Nelson Mandela University, took a break to snap a photo of her collaborators doing fieldwork in South Africa using Sparkles the inflatable unicorn, “an excellent and hilarious stable floating platform to operate the freeze-corer from,” Quick said. The image is now famous as a winner of #ScientistAtWork, a photo contest run by the science journal Nature. The whole gang was there, from right to left: The elbow of Kathryn Sokolowski, anthropology master’s student; Tyler Faith, associate professor of anthropology and curator of archaeology at the Natural History Museum of Utah; Stella Mosher, geography doctoral student; Mitch Power, professor of geography and curator of plant collections at NHMU; and of course, Sparkles the inflatable unicorn.
Photo Credit: LYNNE QUICK