Canadian Museum of Nature, and the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The project was conceived and initiated by anthropologist Brian Noble and palaeontologist Philip J. Currie. Noble, who named the Foundation and lead the international team from 1983 to 1989, invited Taft to become a co-founding member of Ex Terra's Board in 1984. The project included a multimillion-dollar series of expeditions that formed "one of the biggest dinosaur hunts in history". It also included books, internationally televised films, and eventually an international touring exhibit. The joint Canadian-Chinese expeditions went to China's Gobi Desert, Alberta's badlands, and the Canadian arctic. At the time, China was just beginning to open to international visitors, and the Gobi Desert expeditions were the first involving westerners since the 1930s. The project discovered several new dinosaur species and yielded a large number of scientific papers, including a special edition of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. Taft resigned from ExTerra in 1991 when it encountered financial shortfalls. Consulting work From 1991 to 2000, Taft worked as a consultant, researcher, and speaker through his firm Taft Research and Communications. His primary focuses were health care policy, energy, and economic policy. Taft consulted extensively with the Alberta Ministry Responsible for Seniors from 1991 to 1993, an experience that prompted him to write his first book, Shredding the Public Interest, in 1997. In it, Taft challenged the provincial government's claims that spending on public services was soaring. The book was reviewed nationally, and became a bestseller. Shredding the Public Interest placed Taft in the public eye, and cemented his reputation as a government critic. The book generated province-wide debate, attracting public criticism and avid defenders. Premier Klein publicly called Taft a communist, and suggested he should run for political office if he felt he had enough support. Shredding the Public Interest topped local bestseller charts and appeared on national bestselling charts as well. It remained on the Financial Post's national bestseller list for 14 weeks, and was named Trade Book of the Year by the Alberta Book Publishers' Association in 1998. In 1999, Taft co-authored a study criticizing the deregulation of Alberta's electricity system, and in 1999 and 2000, he wrote two studies arguing against privatizing Epcor, Edmonton's public electricity utility. In large part because of this research, Edmonton's city council of the day eventually dropped its plans to sell Epcor in