Australia: Dinosaur report could threaten gas hub

From 7NewsL ABC: Dinosaur report could threaten gas hub

A report on the prehistoric times of Western Australia's Kimberley region is the latest potential threat to the State Government's proposed $30 billion gas hub.

Palaeontologist Tony Thulborn has spent decades researching dinosaur footprints around the area north of Broome, and recently published a report in a peer-reviewed online journal.

The oil and gas company Woodside wants to use the area to process liquid natural gas from the Browse Basin.

Dr Thulborn says his report finds the James Price Point area is the only site in the world created by dinosaurs and should be protected.

"I said in my article I think it's the only place you can actually see an ancient landscape that has been moulded on that scale by the comings and goings of the dinosaurs in that day," he said.

"I've explained my interpretation in that article and I've tried to do it with pictures as well as words and I've put it in a journal online with open access."

Woodside has raised concerns about the report.

The company says it believes the footprints researched in the precinct area are not of museum grade and that those in other parts of the Dampier Peninsula are greater in number and of better quality.

The Environmental Protection Authority says Dr Thulborn's report will be considered as part of the final environmental assessment by the Federal Government mid-year.

Dinosaur with tiny arms unearthed in Argentina

From Hindustani Times: Dinosaur with tiny arms unearthed in Argentina

Argentine experts have discovered the near-complete remains of a new species of Jurassic-era dinosaur that stood on its rear legs and had tiny arms, a leading paleontologist has said. The find belongs to the Abelisaurus family, "the most common carnivorous species in the southern hemisphere during the Cretaceous Period," some 70 to 100 million years ago, paleontologist Diego Pol told AFP yesterday.

"However the fossils that we found are some 170 million years old," from the earlier Jurassic Period, Pol said.
The creature looks a bit like a scaled-down Tyrannosaurus rex, but with even smaller arms.

he new species, baptised Eoabelisaurus mefi, predates the oldest known member of the Abelisauri lineage by more than 40 million years.

Unlike its descendants, this six-metres long creature "has completely reduced arms and tiny claws, which implies that it used only its very sharp teeth to feed itself," Pol said.

Abelisauri remains have been found only in the southern hemisphere.

Experts believe a great desert in the Earth's single land mass at the time, Pangea, could have acted as a geographic barrier, preventing the species from spreading north.

The fossils were discovered on Condor Hill, in the southern Patagonian province of Chubut, some 1,800 kilometres southwest of Buenos Aires.

A 25-member team from the Edigio Feruglio Museum of Paleontology in Chubut discovered the creature's cranium and vertebrae during a dig in 2009.

The team was forced to abandon the expedition when winter approached, and returned the next year during the summer, when "we found the animal's whole articulated skeleton," Pol said.

Details of the find appear in an article Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

Argentina earned fame as a prime site for dinosaur fossil hunters with several discoveries in the 1980s, including the Argentinosaurus Huinculensis, a giant herbivore more than 40 metres long that lived 98 million years ago.

In 1993, scientists in Argentina found the remains of the Giganotosaurus Carolinii, a T-Rex type creature that is the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever found.

Secaucus, NJ: Dinosaurs Appear Within an Hour's Drive from Here

From Woodbridge Patch: Dinosaurs Appear Within an Hour's Drive from Here

New Jersey is often referred to as a state that has everything. Miles of ocean shoreline, mountains, cities and now, dinosaurs.

Saturday was the opening day of Field Station: Dinosaurs, a 20-acre outdoor educational park filled with 31 animatronic dinosaurs, located next to Laurel Hill park in Secaucus.

As visitors walk an outdoor trail set up to look like an expedition site, they come across moving, breathing and roaring dinosaurs towering before them.

All of the dinosaurs were created to scale, according to Jason P. Schein, assistant curator of natural history for the New Jersey State Museum.

However, some aspects of dino recreation are more difficult, such as skin color and vocal sounds, he said.
New Jersey has actually been a dinosaur home for millions of years.

The state once housed many dig sites, according to Schein. One particularly rich site still exists in Gloucester County, where many fossils are still found, including plant and animal fossils, he said.

"New Jersey has such a great history of paleontology," Schein said.

Specifically within the park, some New Jersey natives can be seen, including the Hadrosaurus and the Dryptosaurus.

According to Guy Gsell, the park's president and chief executive producer, the task of bringing the park to life was a year and a half in the making.

Gsell has a background in educational theater, particularly for children, and also previously was the founding director of Discovery Times Square in Manhattan.

By combining the two - education and theater, Field Station Dinosaurs took shape. And, it indulged his inner child.

"When I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs," Gsell said.

In addition to the dinos, the park hosts interactive workshops and games, such as game shows, dinosaur meet and greets, a fossil dig site, and interactive shows featuring a 15-foot animatronic T-Rex puppet.

During an advance opening on Friday, while area children off from school gawked at the T-Rex during its "feeding," Gsell said the park was eager to see people coming in through the gate.

"Seeing those kids here is making me so happy, because we've been (performing) for rocks," Gsell said.
Those rocks, by the way, may not be the best audience, but are also noteworthy, Gsell said.

The large rocks in the quarry area of the park are metamorphic rock, and 200 million years old, Gsell said.
Gsell said the staff of Field Station Dinosaurs has been hearing a lot of the obvious pop culture reference in relation to the park, and it's not accurate.

"We're not pretending to be 'Jurassic Park,'" he said.

Field Station Dinosaurs is located at One Dinosaur Way, which connects to New Country Road in Secaucus.
It is accessible via exit 15X on the NJ Turnpike, and within walking distance of the Secaucus NJ Transit station.

Admission is $25 for adults and $20 for children ages 12 and younger, and senior citizens. Children younger than the age of two are admitted free.

For more information on the park, visit www.fieldstationdinosaurs.com.

It's not supposed to rain while you're on vacation!

I'm sitting in a cabin up near Mount Rushmore with my mom and my aunt...and it's raining!

So we're playing Scrabble.

We'll be leaving for home early tomorrow, as its a 5 hour drive and we're seeing a play at 7.30...but I'll try to post at some point, on matters relevant to this blog!

Saturday I should be back to my old routine.

Again, thanks for your patience.

I crave your indulgence

My mother's sister is visiting for three days.


My mom's deaf as a post, my dad can't be bothered to get out of his chair, so I will be doing the entertaining - the chauffeuring and the talking and the communicating - for the next three days.


So I'll be posting back here Thursday.


Thanks for your patience.

A Miniature Dinosaur Celebrity

From Smithsonian Dinosaur Tracking Blog: A Miniature Dinosaur Celebrity

The Dinosaur Museum, tucked away a few blocks from Blanding, Utah’s main drag, is an unusual place. Intricately detailed sculptures stand next to casts of fossils, full-size paintings of skeletons and various bits of dinosauriana, mixed together to create rooms full of competing dinosaur images. But I didn’t expect to run into a minor dinosaur celebrity in the galleries. Displayed in a small glass case were the decaying remains of King Kong‘s “Brontosaurus.”

I had almost forgotten about the stop-motion dinosaur. In the original, 1933 King Kong, the sharp-toothed sauropod made a brief appearance as a terrifying, carnivorous swamp monster. Worst of all, the dinosaur was just as dangerous on land as in the water. After wrecking the expedition’s boats, the Brontosaurus shuffled after the fleeing humans and nabbed one crew member dumb enough to think you can escape a long-necked dinosaur by climbing a tree.

But that wasn’t the model’s only appearance. The same model was employed in Son of Kong, a hastily created sequel to the initial hit, released a scant nine months after the first film. And the Brontosaurus was made to do double duty. Not only did the Brontosaurus make a brief cameo at the end of the movie, but the film’s special effects creators refashioned the model into a gnarly sea monster.

Today, this piece of Hollywood memorabilia looks even more monstrous. Time has not been kind to the dinosaur. The fabricated flesh has decayed from around the model’s mouth, eyes and neck, making the dinosaur look even more angry than it ever appeared on film. The sauropod was always meant to be scary, but it looks even more intimidating as a tattered cinema zombie.

Dinosaur-Era Insects Frozen in Time During Oldest Pollination

From Live Science: Dinosaur-Era Insects Frozen in Time During Oldest Pollination
With massive dinosaurs towering above, tiny female insects called thrips had just dusted themselves with hundreds of pollen grains from a gingko tree more than 100 million years ago when they perished, only to be preserved in tree resin called amber.

The discovery, detailed this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the oldest known record of insect pollination.

(Pollination occurs when either the wind or an animal, mostly insects, deliver pollen from a plant's male reproductive organ to the female parts either on the same plant or another one.)

During the lower Cretaceous Period when the newly discovered thrips lived, flowering plants would have just started to diversify, eventually replacing conifers as the dominant species, the researchers said.

"This is the oldest direct evidence for pollination, and the only one from the age of the dinosaurs," study researcher Carmen Soriano said in a statement. "The co-evolution of flowering plants and insects, thanks to pollination, is a great evolutionary success story." A synchrotron X-ray image of the specimen of Gymnospollisthrips minor, showing the pollen grains (yellow) covering its body.

Soriano and an international team of scientists studying the two pieces of amber, which were discovered in what is now northern Spain, say the specimens date back between 110 million and 105 million years ago.

They found six female thrips, also called thysanopterans, enclosed in the amber, with hundreds of pollen grains attached to their tiny bodies — the insects are just 2 millimeters long. The thrips, the researchers found, belong to a new genus now named Gymnopollisthrips, with two new species, G. minor and G. major.

After the amber pieces' initial discovery, they were then kept in a collection of the Museo de Ciencias Naturales de Álava in Spain.

To get a closer look at the pollination event frozen in time, the team used synchrotron X-ray tomography at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), focusing on the most representative of the amber-encapsulated thrips. In synchrotron X-ray tomography, charged particles are sent speeding through magnetic fields; these particles release high-energy light that can then pierce opaque materials to reveal three-dimensional, high-resolution images.

The images revealed various features of the pollen grains, together suggesting the grains came from a kind of cycad, or gingko, tree, the researchers said. Gingkos have separate male and female trees, with males producing small pollen cones and females bearing ovules at the ends of stalks that develop into seeds after pollination.

The researchers wondered what these pollen transporters would've gotten in return for their services so long ago. The benefit must have been the opportunity to pick up pollen food for the thrips' larvae, said the researchers, adding that this benefit would have nudged the emergence of the ringed hairs specialized for pollen transport.

"Thrips might indeed turn out to be one of the first pollinator groups in geological history, long before evolution turned some of them into flower pollinators," Soriano said.

Fossil shows off that even the DINOSAURS suffered arthritis 150 million years ago

From Daily Mail: Fossil shows off that even the DINOSAURS suffered arthritis 150 million years ago


Dinosaurs suffered painful arthritis in their huge joints, scientists revealed for the first time today.


Researchers found signs of a degenerative condition similar to human arthritis in the jaw of a pliosaur - an ancient sea reptile that lived 150 million years ago.

The discovery marks the first time arthritis-like diseases have been found in fossilised Jurassic reptiles.

A team from Bristol University examined a giant specimen of the pliosaur Pliosaurus dating from the Upper Jurassic period, which was found in Westbury, Wiltshire.


The eight metre long creature had a large crocodile-like head, a short neck, whale-like body and four powerful flippers to propel it through water.

It has huge jaws and teeth 20cm long - capable of ripping most other reptiles or dinosaurs to pieces - but suffered from an arthritis-like disease, they found.

This caused its left jaw joint to erode, displacing its lower jaw to one side.
The dinosaur is believed to have suffered with the condition for years as there are marks on the bone of the lower jaw where the teeth from the upper jaw impacted during feeding.

Dr Judyth Sassoon, of the University of Bristol, who studied the skeleton, said: ‘In the same way that aging humans develop arthritic hips, this old lady developed an arthritic jaw, and survived with her disability for some time.

‘But an unhealed fracture on the jaw indicates that at some time the jaw weakened and eventually broke.

‘With a broken jaw, the pliosaur would not have been able to feed and that final accident probably led to her demise.’

There are several signs to suggest the skeleton was of an old female, who developed the condition as part of the ageing process - like many humans.


The pliosaurs large size and fused skull bones suggest maturity, while it is believed to be female because its skull crest is quite low.

Pliosaurs are thought to have been pursuit or ambush predators, feeding on fish, squid and other marine reptiles but would also have been able to scavenge.

They were at the top of their food chains so would only have had to fend off attacks from other pliosaurs.

Professor Mike Benton, a collaborator on the project, added: ‘You can see these kinds of deformities in living animals, such as crocodiles or sperm whales and these animals can survive for years as long as they are still able to feed.

‘But it must be painful. Remember that the fictional whale, Moby Dick from Herman Melville's novel, was supposed to have had a crooked jaw!’

UK: Giant robotic dinosaurs gear up for Age of the Dinosaurs blockbuster at the Ulster Museum

From culture24: Giant robotic dinosaurs gear up for Age of the Dinosaurs blockbuster at the Ulster Museum

As most younger museum visitors know, any big dinosaur exhibition worth its salt must have a mechanically driven “animatronic” dinosaur or two to enthral both kids and parents alike.

Faithfully adhering to this recent post-Jurassic Park tradition, and ahead of its summer dinosaur blockbuster Age of the Dinosaur, the Ulster Museum has spent the past week installing a huge, 1.5 tonne animatronic Tarbosaurus into its exhibition halls – with a little help from animatronic experts at The Natural History Museum.

The enormous hunter, which was a close relative of T-Rex and a top predator of the Jurassic age, is just one of seven moving creatures featured in the touring exhibition opening for a four-month spell from May 19.

More than 60 unique specimens from the Natural History Museum join the magnificent mechanical seven together with many objects from the Ulster Museum’s own extensive dinosaur collections.

Dr Mike Simms, Curator of Palaeontology at the Ulster Museum, said the installation of the 3.5-metre-high robotic predator was “quite a challenge” but declared the end result to be “fantastic”.

“I have no doubt visitors to the exhibition will be thrilled by it,” he added. “This exhibition is an amazing sensory experience and will transport visitors back to the days of the dinosaur to discover more about these fascinating creatures and their diverse environments.”

The museum has also released details of a new kids’ discovery zone called Discover Dinosaurs. It will give youngsters the opportunity to handle fossil specimens including leg bones, skulls and dinosaur eggs from National Museums Northern Ireland’s collections and take part in dino fossil digs.

• Age of the Dinosaurs May 19 - September 16. Due to anticipated high demand, the Ulster Museum will open on Mondays during July and August. Advance booking of tickets and timeslots is recommended and can be booked online at www.nmni.com

Media Blows Hot Air About Dinosaur Flatulence

From Smithsonian, Blog: Media Blows Hot Air About Dinosaur Flatulence

It sounds like perfect journalist bait: Earlier this week, a new Current Biology paper proposed that the accumulated output of dinosaur farts could have changed the global climate. You could hardly ask for a better story. Dinosaurs are ever-popular media darlings, and the science of sauropod farts is just silly enough to grab the public’s attention. Too bad sources like FOX News, Gawker and the Daily Mail issued some rather noxious stories about the research.
The paper itself, written by researchers David Wilkinson, Euan Nisbet and Graeme Ruxton, is an exercise in short but serious speculation. For a long time, the digestive biology of sauropods has confounded paleontologists. Sauropods had small teeth good for gripping, nipping and plucking plants, but not for chewing or otherwise mashing up their food. How they broke down the masses of plant food they must have required is a mystery. For a time, swallowed stones called gastroliths were thought to be the answer, but recent reviews of the evidence have failed to turn up any indication that stones ground up food in sauropods’ guts. Instead, some paleontologists have gravitated toward the idea that sauropods had vast communities of microscopic organisms in their stomachs that broke down the incoming plants. This microorganism-assisted fermentation could have produced methane, and as Wilkinson and co-authors point out, sauropod farts would have been the end result.
Since emissions from cows and other livestock contribute greenhouse gases to our warming atmosphere, Wilkinson and collaborators wondered if sauropods might have had a similar effect on the Mesozoic world. To find out, they paired estimates of sauropod population size derived from the fossil record of the roughly 150-million-year-old Morrison Formation—the geological slice in which Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus and other Jurassic giants are found—with an estimate of how much methane each dinosaur would produce based on observations of modern rabbit and guinea pig emissions. Assuming that ten Apatosaurus-size sauropods lived per square kilometer, and that half the world’s land area was inhabited by dinosaurs, Wilkinson and colleagues found that the giant, long-necked dinosaurs would have produced 520 million metric tons of methane annually. In their estimation, this is comparable to the amount of methane that we’re currently pumping into the atmosphere each year. The researchers conclude that so much dinosaur flatulence—in addition to greenhouse gases from fires and other sources—might have created and sustained the relatively warm world of the dinosaurs.
But we don’t know for sure. The new research relies on a stack of assumptions and is, at best, a rough model. We don’t know what the gut flora of sauropods was like; therefore, we don’t know whether they farted at all. And small, mammalian herbivores such as rabbits and guinea pigs are unlikely to be the best models for sauropod emissions. Living dinosaurs and their cousins aren’t much help here. Modern avian dinosaurs don’t fart, and I haven’t seen any research on whether crocodylians—the closest living cousins of dinosaurs as a whole—produce methane-rich eruptions. (If you know about croc fart research, please chime in.)
It’s not unreasonable to wonder about dinosaur digestive products. Paleontologist Tony Fiorillo speculated about hadrosaur gas at a 2010 American Geophysical Union meeting. Perhaps fortunately, our ability to investigate dinosaur farts is severely limited. Furthermore, paleo-blogger Jon Tennant names a number of other problems with the back-of-the-envelope calculations at the heart of the paper—including the estimates of sauropod abundance worldwide—and rightly concludes that the paper is a “crude analysis.”
The media coverage has been even cruder. In the past month we’ve had vapid reports of aquatic dinosaurs and alien dinosaurs, but at least three news sources decided to up the ante with additional bad reporting. Fox News led off with “Dinosaurs may have farted themselves to extinction, according to a new study from British scientists.” Wrong right out of the gate. Wilkinson and co-authors didn’t say a thing about dinosaur extinction in their paper. Not to mention that the idea doesn’t make any sense. Titanic sauropods were around for about 130 million years. If their gases were so deadly, why did it take so long for the world to be overwhelmed? The Fox News gloss isn’t even a misrepresentation of what the researcher said. The story’s headline and lead are outright fabrications. And the same fiction was repeated on the network’s late-night roundtable of chattering commentators, Red Eye.
Gawker simply recycled Fox’s bad air. “A new study from British scientists published in Current Biology suggests the dinosaur infraorder known as sauropods may have actively contributed to its own extinction through excessive flatulence,” wrote site contributor Neetzan Zimmerman, who linked backed to the Fox News item. News aggregation and snarky commentary are popular right now, and in cases like this, lazy and sensationalist reporting can rapidly be echoed across the web. Although I’m not going to give the typically awful Daily Mail credit for independently misconstruing the paper’s results.
The Daily Beast’s Daniel Stone and PZ Myers of Pharyngula tore into the media coverage earlier this week. There’s sadly no shortage of facepalm-inducing reporting, but it’s even worse when news sources are so enamored with a punchline that they simply make up conclusions. Not that I expect Fox News, the Daily Mail, or Gawker to stop blowing hot air whenever the opportunity arises.
References:
Wilkinson, D., Nisbet, E., & Ruxton, G. (2012). Could methane produced by sauropod dinosaurs have helped drive Mesozoic climate warmth? Current Biology, 22 (9) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.042

Dinosaurs 'gassed' themselves into extinction, British scientists say

The paragraph I bolded at the end of this article explains it. There are a lot of cattle herds out there used for meat that we eat... there is a movent to get rid of them and turn us all into vegetarians, hence this concern for the methane they produce... if we (meaning the whiole world) move to a vegetarian diet, growing feed for cattle can instead be changed into growing feed for humans. Vegans win!

From Fox News:  Dinosaurs 'gassed' themselves into extinction, British scientists say
LONDON – Dinosaurs may have farted themselves to extinction, according to a new study from British scientists.
The researchers calculated that the prehistoric beasts pumped out more than 520 million tons (472 million tonnes) of methane a year -- enough to warm the planet and hasten their own eventual demise.
Until now, an asteroid strike and volcanic activity around 65 million years ago had seemed the most likely cause of their extinction.

'These dinosaurs may have produced more methane than all the modern sources put together.'
- Co-researcher David Wilkinson
Giant plant-eating sauropods were fingered as the key culprits in the study, which appears in the latest edition of the journal Current Biology. An average argentinosaurus, weighing around 90 tons (82 tonnes) and measuring 140 feet (42m), chomped its way through half a ton (half a tonne) of ferns a day, producing clouds of methane as the food broke down in its gut.
Professor Graeme Ruxton from St. Andrews University in Scotland and co-researcher David Wilkinson, from Liverpool John Moores University, worked out just how much of the greenhouse gas the billions of dinosaurs would have generated during the Mesozoic era, starting 250 million years ago.
"A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate," Wilkinson said. "In fact, our calculations suggest these dinosaurs may have produced more methane than all the modern sources, natural and human, put togetether.

The dinosaur output of 520 million tons (472 million tonnes) is comparable to current natural and man-made emissions of the greenhouse gas, which scientists say is around 21 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat on Earth and causing climate change. Cows and other farm animals globally contribute up to 100 million tons (90 million tonnes) a year of methane.

Frenchman finds dinosaur bone while digging in garden

From MyFoxFDW: Frenchman finds dinosaur bone while digging in garden
LE MANS, France -- A man gardening at his home in northwestern France made an astonishing discovery -- he found a 100 million-year-old dinosaur bone.

Bruno Lebie was doing some digging when he came across the four-inch (10cm) bone on his property in regional Louplande, news website The Local reported Friday.

"I said to myself, 'could that be a dinosaur bone?' It's not really my niche," Lebie told the Ouest-France daily, a provincial newspaper.

Lebie's neighbor showed the bone to an archaeological friend who confirmed that it was a rare discovery.

The bone was later identified to have come from the foot of an ornithopod dinosaur -- a two-legged herbivore -- by Nicolas Morel, chief of the Green Museum, a natural history museum in Le Mans, 11 miles (18km) away.

Over the past two centuries, four other similar bones have been found in the area.

US billionaire Koch gives $35 mln to dinosaur museum

From Chicago Tribune: US billionaire Koch gives $35 mln to dinosaur museum
KANSAS CITY, Kan., May 3 (Reuters) - American industrialist David Koch, a major supporter of conservative causes, said on Thursday his lifelong fascination with dinosaurs drove his $35 million donation to renovate the National Museum of Natural History's dinosaur hall.

The gift was the largest single donation in the Washington-based museum and research institution's 112-year history, the Smithsonian Institution said.

"I've had a love affair with dinosaurs since I was a boy," Koch, who turned 72 on Thursday, told Reuters in a telephone interview from New York, where he lives.

"I realized that the exhibit at the Smithsonian was very out of date. Some of it goes back 100 years, and we were in desperate need of renovation," said Koch, who is on the museum's board of directors.

The current display on dinosaurs and paleontology has gone mostly unchanged for 30 years, and the Koch donation will cover most of the planned $45 million renovation, said Randall Kremer, a spokesman for the museum.

"This would not happen if not for the gift from Mr. Koch," Kremer said. "This is just a great day for the museum and the country."

The new hall will showcase part of the museum's 46 million-piece fossil collection and feature new displays on how dinosaurs and other creatures lived.

The Smithsonian Board of Regents agreed to name the updated 25,000-square-foot exhibition space after Koch. The museum already has the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, which opened in 2010.

Koch has donated to the Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2006, he gave $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to support its dinosaur exhibit.

David and his brother Charles Koch are also among the largest contributers to Republican causes and candidates.

Koch said on Thursday he has given "by far" more money to philanthropic, charitable and other non-profit groups than he has to political concerns.

"I have a strong moral code and I have an opportunity to give," he said.

At Science Museum, plenty of buried treasures

From Minneapolis Star Tribune: At Science Museum, plenty of buried treasures
Ed Fleming opens the aluminum cabinet and allows his guest to lean in for a peek. "This is the so-called Thunderbird pot," says Fleming, curator of archaeology for the Science Museum of Minnesota. "It's probably my favorite piece here." It's also one of the many hidden treasures in the museum's vault that the public rarely, if ever, gets to see.

Created by local American Indians more than 700 years ago, the Thunderbird pot is a large ceramic vessel about the size of a soccer ball. It's veined with faint cracks where it has been professionally pieced back together. Among its swirl of faded designs, the distinct drawing of a bird emerges to the foreground. "It's unusual because it's a figurative representation rather than an abstraction," notes Fleming.

The Thunderbird pot was unearthed during the 1960s from a pre-colonial American Indian village near Red Wing, Minn. It has lived in the museum's 10,000 square foot, climate controlled vault ever since. "I'd like to get this on the floor because it's such a great piece," Fleming said.

Like any museum, the Science Museum of Minnesota employs a small team of curators such as Fleming. Their jobs entail preserving, promoting and interpreting the 1.75 million artifacts in museum's sprawling collection, including the Thunderbird pot.

Unlike the typical museum, however, the museum's curators have an additional responsibility: They're supposed to help populate the galleries. That is, they conduct original research and fieldwork that eventually shows up in public exhibits.

The most significant contributions have been made by 79-year-old staff paleontologist Bruce Erickson. He started working at the museum in 1959, when the dinosaur collection was pretty paltry.

"They basically told him, 'Go out and get a dinosaur,'" said Fleming.

Within two years, Erickson had done just that -- he unearthed the museum's crowd-pleasing triceratops, still one of the largest and most complete specimens in the world, from northeastern Montana in 1961.

Erickson later discovered the museum's jaw-dropping diplodocus skull, now on display in the Dino and Fossil Gallery. More recently, he discovered the skeleton of a mammoth near Albert Lea, Minn., which visitors can see in the new Future Earth exhibit.

Fleming, 41, has made a few discoveries of his own. For example, he helped excavate and analyze the Cross Site, another pre-colonial American Indian settlement in Minnesota. A few of his findings are displayed in the Mississippi River Gallery.

A native of the Midwest, Fleming is particularly fascinated with sites such as these in the Mississippi River Valley.

That's why he prefers the Thunderbird pot over, say, ancient Peruvian textiles or Etruscan bronze.

In the pre-Colonial era, "the Red Wing area was a point of interaction," said Fleming. "It was intensely occupied, especially between 1100 and 1350."

Many of Fleming's predecessors shared his interest in the area. During the 1950s, in fact, researchers from the Science Museum were involved with excavating a Mississippi River site called Spring Lake. Knives, bottles and pipes -- these findings were collected but never analyzed by staff scientists. So Fleming and his team have finally started combing through the Spring Lake findings piece by piece.

So far, they've discovered that Spring Lake was settled for a longer period than originally thought. "The bow and arrow showed up in this area in about 700 AD or so," said Fleming.

Then again, Fleming has dated a few of the site's pottery fragments to the Oneota period, about 900 to 1600 AD.

When can the public finally meet with these discoveries from Spring Lake? Look for a new display in the Mississippi River Gallery sometime in the next year, said Fleming. Meanwhile, he has recorded his observations and insights on a special Spring Lake blog. Check it out at www.smm.org.