Jurassic consultant plans 'chickenosaurus'

From the Edmonton Sun: Jurassic consultant plans 'chickenosaurus'

Jack Horner is building his own living dinosaur, as a pet and as a legitimate science project. Creating what has been dubbed “the chickenosaurus” has not happened yet but Horner is confident it will as he continues his research.

Does this sound crazy? Maybe a little. Does this sound eccentric? A lot. Does it all seem rather exciting? Absolutely.

Horner is the famed Montana-born, American paleontologist Dr. John R. Horner. Based at the Museum of the Rockies, Horner is known in science circles for — among many significant breakthroughs — co-discovering the colonial nesting site of a new species he and research partner Bob Makela called maiasaura, or good mother lizard. One of Horner’s specialities is dinosaur behaviour. He has helped to radically change the science of paleontology and mainstream understanding of evolution and the age of dinosaurs.

Horner is known in popular entertainment as the science consultant to producer-director Steven Spielberg on the Jurassic Park franchise (Spielberg has indicated there will be a fourth instalment soon). Horner was the real-life role model for Sam Neill’s character, paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant. Meanwhile, Horner is currently working with the television series Terra Nova, also a Spielberg production. While he sighs over the fact the dinosaurs he consults on spend most of their time in the Jurassic Park movies and in Terry Nova chasing and eating people — something the scientist in him finds ridiculous and unrealistic, especially when the T-rex in the original Jurassic Park chews through metal to get at the human prey — he is proud his dino actors look more realistic each time out. Including getting more feathery and more colourful. Horner’s Hollywood connection also keeps him in the public eye, which helps in raising private funding for his research, not least the chickenosaurus project.

“If I’m going to raise private funds, then people have to know what I do,” Horner tells Sun Media.

My interview with Horner is timed with this week’s Blu-ray debut of Jurassic Park: Ultimate Trilogy. We talk movies and dinosaurs. Interesting enough for my other home entertainment story. But I find it impossible to ignore the chickenosaurus project.

First though, I amuse Horner when I tell him I am a bird watcher — and therefore a watcher of living dinosaurs. “That you are!” he says with a deep chuckle. Birds evolved from feathered dinosaurs. This is popularly accepted now as science fact (unless you are a creationist, in which case you should probably not read this article nor watch any of the Jurassic Park movies, and certainly not Terra Nova). But, at the time that the first Jurassic Park was released in 1993, bird ancestry was not widely appreciated by the public. Hence the scene in which Neill, as Dr. Alan Grant, explains it to snickering students at his Montana dig.

There is other good science in Jurassic Park, such as the introductory animation. Most of the dino behaviour, however, is just Hollywood invention that grew out of Michael Crichton’s fantastical novel. Also dubious is the notion that dino DNA can be extracted from insects trapped in amber. Doesn’t work at all, as Horner’s team has proven. Instead, to realize a boyhood dream of owning his own pet dinosaur, and to forward the legitimate science of paleontology, Horner and his chickenosaurus collaborators are exploring other avenues to create a living dinosaur out of the jungle fowl or domestic chicken.

“We have a lot of what we would call biological modification tools, ways of changing organisms,” Horner explains. “One that we’ve used for years is just selective breeding, and you could probably make a chickenosaurus doing just that. You could probably select the characters and get a long tail and hands instead of wings. But it would take a long time and I just don’t have that much time.” Horner is 65. “I would just as soon get it done.”

That leaves other more urgent biological modification tools to work with. “There are a couple of different ways you can do it,” Horner says. “You can either find the genes that extend the tail or find the atavistic genes that produce it. Or you can find the genes that absorb the tail during embryoic genesis. “So that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re looking for any one of them (the genes).”

Why?

Horner has been answering that question repeatedly ever since the chickenosaurus project was first made public. As a media-friendly scientist with a droll sense of humour, he has been playful, yet scientifically rigourous, about his answers.

“Well, first off, it would be cool,” Horner says with another booming laugh. “And I don’t think many people would argue with that, just left alone (to contemplate the notion).” That is the playful side of Horner.

“But, once it can be done, if you can re-activate ancestral characters, you’ve demonstrated that it had ancestors. And that is one of the proofs of evolution.” If those characters in the chicken, or jungle fowl, are shown to be traced back to dinosaurs, that would indeed be proof of this aspect of evolutionary science.

There are more why answers here, Horner says. “It certainly has an educational purpose, besides being cool, but it also has the potential for a lot of medical applications once we understand how these genes operate. So the ‘why’ depends (on the interests of the person engaging the project). One of these reasons has to be good for somebody.”

Keeping the funding for the chickenosaurus project 100 percent private, and not public, is important to Horner. It gives him the freedom to develop pure science for its own sake, with no strings attached.

“It’s hard to convince governments to spend money on something they don’t want to spend money on, because governments are made up of people and people have their opinions and politicians definitely have their opinions. If they happen to be a little more on the creationist side rather than on the science side, then they’re not going to put much money into it.

“But the nice thing is that all of the research that I’m doing — whether it be on dinosaur growth or behaviour or building a chickenosaurus — All the funding is coming from private donations.”

Track dinosaurs at natural area

From The Coloradoan, Xplore Section: Track dinosaurs at natural area

Leave only footprints. Take only pictures."

This mantra adorns signs and brochures at parks throughout the U.S. This statement encourages people to leave little trace when enjoying the outdoors.

At Dinosaur Ridge near Morrison, this phrase takes on an entirely different meaning because here visitors can take pictures of the footprints left by dinosaurs more than 100 million years ago for a unique step back in time.

Dinosaur bones were discovered at Dinosaur Ridge in 1877 by Arthur Lakes, a teacher at the new Colorado School of Mines. This discovery led to the identification of stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, allosaurus and the crocodile goniopholis.

Today, the area is considered one of the best preserved representations of dinosaur fossils, bones and tracks. This significance was recognized when it was designated as the Morrison Fossil Area National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service in 1973. It also was designated a State Natural Area by Colorado in 2002 for its scientific, historical and educational significance.

Dinosaur Ridge, which is part of the Dakota Hogback, includes three different formations: the Morrison Formation of the Jurassic period on the west side and the Dakota Formation of the Cretaceous period and the Benton Formation on the east side.

The Morrison Formation is where visitors will see fossilized dinosaur bones. These 150-million-year-old bones came from the bodies of apatosaurus, stegosaurus, allosaurus and diplodocus. The apatosaurus bones were the first bones of a mega-sized dinosaur ever discovered. Commonly called the brontosaurus, this animal weighed up to 33 tons. Cross-sections of the foot imprints of these massive animals can be seen in the rocks.

In 1937, construction started on Alameda Parkway to provide access to Red Rocks Park. This construction exposed hundreds of dinosaur tracks in the Dakota Sandstone. These tracks were later identified as part of the "Dinosaur Freeway," an expanse of megatrack sites that extends from Boulder to eastern New Mexico. Most of these tracks are believed to be made by iguanodons, which lived 120 to 130 million years ago. This plant-eater had a unique thumb spike, which can be seen in the tracks.

The Benton Formation was at one time the bottom of the Western Interior Seaway, an inland sea that covered all of Colorado. In the gray shale, visitors may see 92-million-year-old fossilized fish scales and shark teeth.

There is a 2-mile trail along Dinosaur Ridge, which includes many interpretive signs detailing the history of this unique area.

NJ, November 2, 2011: Around The Towns: Children to search for dinosaurs at Trailside

From NJ.com: Around The Towns: Children to search for dinosaurs at Trailside
MOUNTAINSIDE — Children who attend the “Discover Dinosaurs” program at the Trailside Nature and Science Center on Wednesday (November 2) will have an opportunity to become paleontologists for an evening.

At the interactive family program, children will have an opportunity to search the visitors center for dinosaur bones, put together a large dinosaur puzzle and measure the sizes of a Stegosaur, Tyrannosaurus and Ultrasaur.

The hour-long program, which will begin at 6 p.m., is recommended for children ages 4 to 5.

The center is located at 452 New Providence Road in Mountainside. There is a $6 fee, $7 for out-of-county residents. Pre-registration is required. To register, visit ucnj.org/trailside or call (908) 789-3670.

California Adopts Cap-and-Trade System, Serves as Greenhouse Guinea Pig

From National Geographic, The Great Energy Challenge: California Adopts Cap-and-Trade System, Serves as Greenhouse Guinea Pig

After a unanimous vote by the California Air Resources Board, the state adopted the most comprehensive cap-and-trade system in the country, a key part of a 2006 global warming law that had yet to be implemented. The system will cover 85 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and allows businesses to counterbalance up to 8 percent of their emissions by buying offset credits.

The state is making itself a guinea pig for climate legislation and hopes to inspire other states to follow suit—a precedent the state has set with other environmental legislation.

At first, most of the emissions credits will be given out free, but it’s expected by 2016 to be a $10 billion market.

Slow Growth

After the economic crash of 2008, the growth of clean energy slowed—and the outlook for the rest of the decade is single-digit growth, according to analyses by IHS Emerging Energy Research and others. A major factor has been that cash-strapped governments have cut back on subsidies that helped drive the growth in renewables.

The U.K. reshuffled its renewable subsidies, taking away from onshore wind and hydro power, and giving more to tidal and biomass power plants. Scotland—which sets its subsidies separately from the rest of the U.K., and which boasts some of the world’s best wind and tidal resources—also made subsidy support adjustments.

Industry experts fear the U.K. may soon slash solar subsidies by half—after already cutting them earlier this year—so they are encouraging people to install solar systems now.

But the World Wildlife Fund argues that high growth of renewables is still possible, and the U.K. could get nearly all of its energy from renewables by 2030.

In the U.S., solar industry jobs grew about 7 percent in the past year—much faster than job growth in the whole economy, but only about a quarter of the rate that the industry had expected, according to the Solar Foundation’s newly released National Jobs Census.

High-Tech Efficiency

In Europe, “business as usual will not be an option for most energy utilities,” according to McKinsey analysts who argued that energy demand is reaching a peak, and existing technologies could drastically cut consumption. In response, utilities should look to other services to keep their revenue up, such as selling solar panels, insulation, or central control units that track and manage a building’s electricity consumption.

One company is already trying to make such products cool. Nest Labs, a well funded start up founded by former Apple employees, have created a thermostat that studies your habits to help adjust the temperature to save energy.

Climate Change Conundrum

Climate change could exceed dangerous levels in some parts of the world during the lifetime of many people alive today, according to research papers published in the journal Nature.

University of Washington Professor of Philosophy Stephen Gardiner argued in Yale Environment 360 that humanity’s institutions aren’t up to the ethical challenge presented by environmental change. As these problems get worse, he argues, we might see a push for technological fixes such as geoengineering.

Some scientists are looking into such methods, and a U.K. group had planned a test flight of a balloon tethered to a hose—the kind that could shoot reflective aerosols into the atmosphere, scatter sunlight and potentially cool the planet. But that group postponed its test until spring to allow “more engagement with stakeholders”—which New Scientist argued is crucial.

Most of the public is not against such research on “solar radiation management” according to a new survey. But critics say the survey may be some biased toward geoengineering research.

Skeptic Changes Mind

A study led by a self-described climate change skeptic—physicist Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley—released results from a re-analysis of temperature records. The “biggest surprise,” Muller said, was how closely his study matched earlier assessments, such as those by NASA and the U.K.’s Hadley Centre. Muller’s study had been hailed by climate change skeptics since it took seriously many of their criticisms.

But in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Muller said “global warming is real,” and argued no one should be a skeptic about this warming any longer.

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday for National Geographic’s News Watch by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

Ancient Toothy Fish Found in Arctic—Giant Prowled Rivers

From National Geographic Daily News: Ancient Toothy Fish Found in Arctic—Giant Prowled Rivers
Fossils of a new species of carnivorous fish that prowled ancient rivers have been discovered in the Canadian Arctic, a new study says.

The 6-foot-long (1.8-meter-long) Laccognathus embryi was "the kind of fish that was waiting to lunge out to grab whatever was in front of it," said study co-author Ted Daeschler, a vertebrate zoologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

The fish's 1.5-inch-long (3.8-centimeter-long) fangs would have definitely sunk into flesh, he added.

In addition, the 375-million-year-old fish had thick, quarter-size scales; tiny eyes; a flat head; and a wide mouth—sort of like a modern-day grouper.

The fossil head "looks like a big, smiling face looking up at you," added Daeschler, who received funding for his research from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)

(See pictures of today's fish giants.)

Newfound Giant Swam With "Missing Link" Fish

Daeschler and colleagues found the new fish fossils during several excavations in a siltstone flood deposit on Ellesmere Island (see map) in Nunavut, Canada. The name L. embryi is a nod to Canadian geologist Ashton Embry, whose Arctic research helped prepare the scientists for their fieldwork.

In 2004 the same "incredibly productive" Arctic site had yielded Tiktaalik roseae, a fossil creature that lived during the same period as L. embryi and is considered to be a crucial link between fish and early limbed animals.

(See "Fossil Fish With 'Limbs' Is Missing Link, Study Says.")

Both Tiktaalik and L. embryi were lobe-finned fish, a group with rounded, limb-like fins. The group was beginning to blink out in the Devonian period, 415 to 360 million years ago—its only surviving members are the "living fossil" fish, the coelacanth, and the lungfish.

The Devonian "was a fish-eats-fish kind of world," Daeschler said. "There was a real arms race going. If you [were a smaller fish and] didn't have good armor on your body, you were very vulnerable."

The period was also "a very watershed time in the history of life on Earth, because you're seeing the dwindling—the end—of many of the more archaic groups ... including many of the lobe-finned fish," Daeschler said.

At the same time, "you're seeing the beginnings of the groups that go on to dominate the vertebrate fauna for the next 375 million years ... the upstarts if you want."

For example, ray-finned fish—the typical body plan we associate with modern fish—had begun to take over the seas.

(Also see "Goliath Tiger Fish: 'Evolution on Steroids' in Congo.")

Devonian World Still a Mystery

Though the Tiktaalik and L. embryi discoveries are valuable in and of themselves, "it's not just finding the animal—it's also placing the animal in its evolutionary crucible," Daeschler added.

For instance, finding the "cast of characters" that once occupied the Arctic site may begin to provide clues about who ate who and may help answer a big question: What environmental conditions drove fish onto land, where they eventually evolved into limbed animals, including us?

"We want to know," Daeschler said, "what that world was like."

The new predatory-fish study was published in September in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Montreal, Canada: Dinosaur exhibit Halloween treat for the kids

From the Montreal Gazette: Dinosaur exhibit Halloween treat for the kids
ONTREAL - It’s Halloween weekend and the children are clamouring for treats. Time to distract them from candy gobbling.

A roar from the Apatosaurus standing guard at the entrance to the Montreal Science Centre might do the trick.

The ginormous herbivore whose name means “deceptive lizard” is from the Late Jurassic period 150 million years ago and is one of 14, real-size animatronic dinosaurs inhabiting the Dinosaurs Unearthed exhibit, at the science centre until March, 2012.

How do they all fit?

“When we think dinosaur, we think huge, but most dinosaurs were small,” Michel Groulx said. Groulx is the head of research and content at the Montreal Science Centre and was impressed with the quality of the exhibit when he visited it in Texas two years ago. The well travelled exhibit was produced in Vancouver.

The biggest discoveries in the field of dinosaur research have taken place in China over the last two decades and these recent discoveries play a major role in the exhibit. Digs have established the fact that some dinosaurs were covered with down feathers when born – including the ferocious velociraptor made famous in the Jurassic Park movies – and that birds are the direct descendants of these dinosaurs.

“The wishbone you find in the turkey carcass has also been found in dinosaur skeletons, Groulx said. “Even the adolescent T. Rex was covered with down.”

Everything included in the exhibition is based on scientific fact except for the colours used. That’s guesswork.

Dinosaurs lived between 225 and 65 million years ago. The common theory among scientists is that an enormous meteor hit earth and changed the environment so much, the dinosaurs could not adapt.

A handy plasticized exhibit guide about the size of a placemat is available at the entrance to the exhibit. There are questions for the children to answer and clues to search for. It must be returned at the end of the tour.

The dinosaurs in the exhibit are motion activated, with a one-minute lag between activations. They roar and move body parts. This could be frightening for some children.

There are fossils to see and some interactive elements to try, but the main focus is on the animated creatures, which cannot be touched.

You see giant Allosaurus, which predates the T. Rex and was just as ferocious, and you see the large, down-covered Gigantoraptor, the largest dinosaur without teeth. He looks like a gargantuan chicken and didn’t last long in the dino scheme of things.

“Scientists’ perceptions of dinosaurs have changed over the last 30 years,” Groulx said. “We used to think they were cold-blooded and stupid. We now know they were warm-blooded and quite social, with maternal instincts.”

While you are in the building, there is a new IMAX 3D movie to check out, just steps away from the dinosaur exhibit. It’s called Tornado Alley 3D.

Questions anyone?

Dinosaurs Unearthed is at the Montreal Science Centre, bottom of St. Laurent Blvd. off de la Commune St., until March 11. For IMAX and exhibit ticket details, 514-496-4724 or www.montrealsciencecentre.com.

Halloween is also up and running at the Botanical Garden, Insectarium and Biodôme. The Little Monsters Courtyard adjacent to the gardens (an outside activity) offers games and challenges for little ones. Host Esmeralda the friendly witch and her sidekick Abracadabra the cat are back as is the playful decorated-pumpkin exhibit in the main exhibition hall.

Learn about jumping spiders at the Insectarium and check out the insects dressed for the Halloween occasion.

And carved pumpkins have been transformed into feeders for the golden lion tamarin monkey at the Biodôme.

For details, www.montrealspaceforlife.ca.

Friday is International Animation Day, and the NFB-organized, Canada-wide event Get Animated! is up and running. The NFB CinéRobothèque, 1564 St. Denis St., offers a free, family oriented animation workshop with Co Hoedeman, Saturday at 10 a.m. (no reservations, first come, first served) and free screenings of some of the latest family-friendly animated short films, Saturday and Sunday at 3:30 p.m.

For more information, 514-496-6887 or www.nfb.ca/cinerobotheque.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/travel/Dinosaur+exhibit+Halloween+treat+kids/5617409/story.html#ixzz1c5rxM2sS

Evidence for huge dinosaur migrations that once took place in ancient America

From IO9: Evidence for huge dinosaur migrations that once took place in ancient America

How dinosaurs spent their lives remains a great mystery of paleontology. We know they ate a lot, and presumably they had sex somehow. But it's almost impossible to prove the existence of more complex dinosaur behaviors...until now.

Thanks to some teeth from the Jurassic period dinosaur Camarasaurus, we have the first clear evidence that dinosaurs migrated over great distances. A slightly smaller relative of plant-eating sauropods like Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus grew up to fifty feet long and lived in what is now Wyoming and Utah.

Colorado College researcher Henry Fricke examined the oxygen isotopes levels in 32 Camarasaurus fossil teeth.The specific ratio of different isotopes can provide an exact signature of where the dinosaurs drank, and that can be compared to rock samples that date to the same time and place. He found the teeth were not an exact match for the rocks, which means Camarasaurus must have left its natural habitat on occasion.

Teeth build up multiple layers over the life of their owner, and each layer preserves the isotopic signature of where the owner was drinking at that given time. Fricke discovered that the layers changed in Camarasaurus over a five month period, which strongly suggests the dinosaurs migrated seasonally. It's the best proof yet that some dinosaurs did indeed move around on a regular basis.

Fricke explains:

"In a theoretical sense, it's not hugely surprising. They are huge - they would probably have eaten themselves out of house and home if they stayed in one place. Now we have evidence that demonstrates that, and a method to move forward and study other dinosaurs."

Camarasaurus likely had to migrate because its regular home was a low-lying floodplain that could easily enter extreme dry periods. Since this was a fairly large population, Camarasaurus wouldn't be able to cope with any research shortages, and the fossil teeth suggest they solved this by moving to higher altitudes. This would have involved migrating at least 200 miles, and it's possible some migrations were much longer.

Now that we know one species migrated, Fricke is hopeful he can find evidence that others did as well. In particular, modern predators often follow migrating herbivores, and it stands to reason that carnivorous dinosaurs like Allosaurus would have done the same, since it would have been ridiculously easy to pick off a Camarasaurus as it was slowly moving towards it new home.

Meet the two-horned cousin of triceratops

From I09: Meet the two-horned cousin of triceratops
(Also at: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2011/10/new-mexicos-peculiar-two-horned-dinosaur/
Triceratops has captured the public imagination ever since the first fossils were discovered in 1887. But it's hardly the only horned dinosaur that once roamed the Earth. Meet the two-horned zuniceratops, oldest of the American relatives of triceratops.

Compared to its more famous cousin, zuniceratops was a tiny dinosaur. The fossil record indicates that triceratops could reach up to thirty feet in length, ten feet in height, and weight over 25,000 pounds. Zuniceratops, on the other hand, was a puny ten feet long and three feet tall, and a very mild 200 to 250 pounds. The creature is named for the Zuni people, a Native American tribe that lives in the area of New Mexico where the dinosaur was discovered in 1996.

Relative to other horned dinosaurs like it - known collectively as the ceratopsians - zuniceratops was both much smaller and much older, dating back at least 90 million years ago. That makes it much older than triceratops, which emerged a mere three million years before the final extinction of the dinosaurs. This two-horned little guy was the earliest known ceratopsian in North America, though he wasn't the grandfather of triceratops - their evolutionary relationship is more like distant cousins once or twice removed, though they do look very similar.

The remains of Zuniceratops exhibit a mosaic of features shared with both earlier ceratopsians (such as Protoceratops) and the later, more familiar ceratopsids (such as Triceratops). While the body of Zuniceratops appeared to retain a more archaic, lightly built form, the prominent brow horns, the arrangement of the teeth (set up like a pair of scissors to shear vertically through food), a curved part of the hip called the ischium, and other characteristics underlined a close relationship to the ceratopsid dinosaurs that would eventually become so common on the continent.

But Zuniceratops was not a “missing link” or an ancestor to any of the ceratopsid dinosaurs. Instead, it is a peculiar dinosaur with a suite of features that may help us understand the transition between the more archaic ceratopsians and the early ceratopsids. The arrangement of anatomical characters in Zuniceratops gives us a general picture of what was happening among the horned dinosaurs at the time. After all, the grand pattern of evolution is a wildly branching tree of life, and in technical terms, Zuniceratops falls on a branch just outside the ceratopsid group—a relatively close cousin—but it did not share some of the telltale characteristics of the famous dinosaur group. Hopefully, as more dinosaurs like Zuniceratops are found, paleontologists will gain a clearer picture of how the greatest of the horned dinosaurs evolved.

References:

Farke, A., Sampson, S., Forster, C., & Loewen, M. (2009). Turanoceratops tardabilis—sister taxon, but not a ceratopsid Naturwissenschaften, 96 (7), 869-870 DOI: 10.1007/s00114-009-0543-8

Wolfe, D.G. & Kirkland, J.I. (1998). “Zuniceratops christopheri n. gen. & n. sp., a ceratopsian dinosaur from the Moreno Hill Formation (Cretaceous, Turonian) of west-central New Mexico”. Lower and Middle Cretaceous Terrestrial Ecosystems, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 24: 307–317.

Wolfe, D. G. (2000). New information on the skull of Zuniceratops christopheri, a neoceratopsian dinosaur from the Cretaceous Moreno Hill Formation, New Mexico. pp. 93–94, in S. G. Lucas and A. B. Heckert, eds. Dinosaurs of New Mexico. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin No. 17.

The ‘dinosaur plant’ not quite Jurassic

From The Conversation: The ‘dinosaur plant’ not quite Jurassic
The widely believed theory that cycad plants, or “dinosaur plants”, are living fossils has been debunked.

Using genetic analyses, researchers found that the current cycad species is different to its Jurassic counterpart even though they look much the same.

The computer-automated analyses and nuclear DNA sequence of the cycad found the current biological species evolved 10 million years ago.

“It goes against what we think about cycads – we thought that there were some new and some old ones, but to find out that they’re all new is astonishing. It shows we shouldn’t take things for granted,” lead author Nathalie Nagalingum told Cosmos Magazine.

Cycads originated more than 270 million years ago and are currently listed as the most endangered plants in the world. The are 70 species of the plant in Australia.

New clues into mass dinosaur extinction

From the Daily Princetonian: New clues into mass dinosaur extinction

To test an alternative theory explaining the 65-million-year-old mass extinction that led to the demise of the dinosaurs, Princeton University researchers developed a model that more accurately accounts for the Earth’s heterogeneities and offers different interpretations from previous models.

The researchers, who were based in the lab of geoscience and applied and computational mathematics professor Jeroen Tromp GS ’92, focused on a theory that explained the mass extinction as the result of a long volcanic eruption triggered by a meteorite strike near Chicxulub on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. This theory suggested that the strike could trigger volcanic activity on the opposite side of the globe.

The project started in May 2010 and was the result of a collaboration between the first author, Matthias Meschede of the University of Munich, and co-authors Conor Myhrvold ’11 and Tromp. Myhrvold was previously a staff photographer for the ‘Prince.’

Meschede, who got involved through the University’s Visiting Student Research Collaborators program, said that the project was interesting for him because it focused on an unconventional source of earthquakes.

The original calculation for a link between the meteorite strike and the catastrophic volcanic eruptions included an analytical approximation based on a spherical earth model that failed to account for the heterogeneities of the Earth. The Princeton research showed the model to be very inaccurate.

“The Princeton group could simulate earthquakes on a global scale better than anybody else could before, and so we could take into account all the heterogeneities of the earth and make a much more accurate calculation,” Meschede said.

The Princeton model showed that, while a symmetric Earth focused seismic waves more strongly on a single point, a non-spherical Earth with heterogeneities spread waves over large areas that decreased the amplitude of earthquakes on the other side of the planet.

As a result, the amplitude of the Earth’s maximum ground displacement in the previous model was decreased by a factor of five; moreover, the Princeton model showed that heterogeneities basically filtered out the highest wave frequencies so that these frequencies became scattered and didn’t interfere constructively.

“This is basically the main difference, and so we think it’s a very important effect that you have to account for,” Meschede said.

Meschede also noted that, based on their findings, a relation between the meteorite strike and volcanic eruptions large enough to cause a mass extinction is unlikely.

In addition to providing more information on the possible connection between the eruption and the meteorite strike, the research has also created a model that could offer insight on the surface of other planets based on past collisions.

“For every meteorite impact, when you want to figure out what’s going to happen on the Earth, the moon, Mercury or Mars you have to consider the focusing effect on the other side, and if you want to see how large this is going to be, then you have to model it like we did,” Meschede said.

Because the Princeton model showed that the focusing factor was decreased by a factor of five when heterogeneities and the Earth’s asymmetry were taken into account, Meschede noted that vast improvements are possible with this more accurate model.

“Apart from that, just being able to simulate the heterogeneities, not just for the meteorite but also for other impacts and other planets — this is the development from the last five to 10 years,” Meschede said.

Dino Dan and Other Kids

I thought the post below was going to talk about the fact that although both girls and boys love dinosaurs, TV shows that cater to children only have the boy as the lead character - as evidenced in Dino Dan.

Cartoons really do girls a dis-service. Boys can be "take charge" kind of kids and get things done, but let a girl have that "can do" attitude, and she's just a bossy bitch. [And, sadly, girls - and when they grow older, women, feel the same way about their female bosses! Because we've been ingrained since childhood that only guys have the right to tell women what they should be doing, presumably.]

But as you see below, the post is rather more concerned about teaching kids that imagination and "wishing" can accomplish things, rather than buckling down to work and making things happen on your own.
From BlogHer.com: Dino Dan and Other Kids Shows Miss the Mark

When Kids Shows Just Miss the Mark:

You know him. You might have been him -- there’s always one in a class. The little boy that’s obsessed with dinosaurs and knows everything about them. No matter what you try to talk about, they find a way to link it to dinosaurs.

That’s Dan. And because this is a show about him, his classmates tolerate him and even think he’s cool.

But there’s a problem. You see, Dan doesn’t just know everything about dinosaurs -- he sees them all around Toronto. The show commits itself to having Dan believe this, even convincing his best friend it’s real. But nobody else believes him, and there are hints all around that it is Dan’s imagination. What could have been a very entertaining show about the power of imagination instead feels more like a little boy who is so desperate for his father that he creates the one scenario that’s guaranteed to bring him home -- real dinosaurs.

Judge orders talks in Montana dinosaur dispute

From Canadian Business: Judge orders talks in Montana dinosaur dispute
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A federal judge has ordered settlement talks in a multi-million-dollar dispute over bone castings from three famed tyrannosaurus rex specimens.

Attorneys say the case is the first of its kind involving a copyright fight over dinosaur castings — fossil replicas often used in museum displays. It pits a South Dakota research company against a Montana nonprofit that allegedly made unauthorized copies of castings from two t-rexes, dubbed Stan and Sue.

The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research claims Fort Peck Paleontology, Inc. of eastern Montana used the castings to fill out incomplete portions of a third tyrannosaurus rex, known as Peck's Rex, and then profited from sales of replicas.

Through a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in federal court in Montana, Black Hills is seeking $7.4 million in damages — a figure that could be tripled to more than $22 million under federal copyright law, said the South Dakota company's attorney, Luke Santangelo.

But Antoinette Tease, a Billings attorney representing Fort Peck Paleontology, says her client made "negligible profits" off the castings and offered to return them but was turned down.

U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon in Great Falls last week sent the case to settlement talks at the request of the two parties. The talks will be overseen by U.S. Magistrate Judge Keith Strong and are expected to convene in January, attorneys said.

Both sides indicated they were hopeful a deal could be reached to resolve the case. Yet they offered sharply different interpretations on whether copyright restrictions were broken and how much damage was done.

"The total number of bones we're talking about, it's an absolute minuscule percentage of the entire t-rex skeleton," Tease said. "They want $22 million for not even the real bones but casts of the bones that are inside the skull."

Replicas of Peck's Rex are in museums including the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Wyoming Dinosaur Center and the Maryland Science Center, according to court documents.

Santangelo said Fort Peck Paleontology had taken actions that were "blatantly wrong" and should be held accountable.

"They're not going to get a complete free pass," he said. "They basically just copied Stan. We don't own a copyright to the t-rex, but we own a copyright to Stan because we created that. They just used it and tried to hide that fact."

The original Sue is a permanent feature at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which bought the specimen at auction for almost $8.4 million. The sale came after an ownership dispute in which the federal government took the dinosaur from the Black Hills Institute following its 1990 discovery, saying it had been taken from Indian land held under federal trust.

Tease says that as a result of losing ownership of Sue, Black Hills' had no right to file for a copyright on the castings it made from the specimen. As for the other castings in question, from the t-rex Stan, Tease says those were given by Black Hills to a paleontologist who worked with — but not for — Fort Peck Paleontology.

Tease said that the employee who used the casts to mold the head of Peck's Rex did so at the direction of that outside paleontologist. Subsequent profits off Peck's Rex totaled "five figures, max," Tease said, adding that her client remained willing to give up the casts still in its possession.

John Rabenberg, an eastern Montana wheat and barley farmer and chairman of Fort Peck Paleontology, said the organization has been shut down until the lawsuit is resolved.

Paleontologists Unveil the 11th Archaeopteryx

From the Smithsonian.com: Dinosaur Trackign Blog: Paleontologists Unveil the 11th Archaeopteryx

For Archaeopteryx, 2011 has been a year of ups and downs. Paleontologists celebrated the 150th anniversary of when the iconic feathered dinosaur was named. But shortly afterwards, a controversial paper in Nature in July proposed that the creature—widely hailed as the first bird—was further removed from avian ancestry than previously thought. Now Archaeopteryx is back on the upswing. According to a press release circulated by the New Munich Trade Fair Centre in Germany, paleontologists now have an 11th specimen of the famous fossil creature to study.

Until this week, ten Archaeopteryx skeletons were known to paleontologists, not including the fossil feather the German paleontologist Hermann von Meyer used to give the animal its name. Peter Wellnhofer, the world’s foremost expert on the “urvogel,” detailed the backstory of each fossil in his comprehensive book Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution. The London specimen and the Berlin specimen are the best known—particularly the latter, arguably one of the most visually stunning fossils ever found—but there’s also the busted-up Maxberg specimen, another that was initially confused for a pterosaur (the Haarlem specimen) and a slab known as the Solnhofen specimen that was originally thought to contain the skeleton of the small coelurosaurian dinosaur Compsognathus.

As far as I am aware, the new specimen does not have a name and has yet to be described in the literature, but this Archaeopteryx appears to be one of the more complete and well preserved of the lot. In fact, the preservation and position of the bones are reminiscent of the Thermopolis specimen I saw in Wyoming this past year, although this new Archaeopteryx is missing one forelimb and the skull. Don’t be fooled by the fact that, at first glance, the fossil looks a little jumbled up. If you start by following the tip of the tail (on the right), the articulated vertebral column leads to the hips and splayed legs before curving up and back in the classic dinosaur death pose. The arm is displaced below the hips but remains articulated.

We will have to wait for the descriptive paper to learn the important characteristics of this new find, as well as where the slab came from. But if you happen to be in the vicinity of the New Munich Trade Fair Centre in Germany, you can see the 11th Archaeopteryx for a limited engagement at “The Munich Show” from October 28-30.

The Living Dinosaur

Ginkgo specimens in their ancestral setting: Shan Jiang village, Guizhou Province, in the People’s Republic of China
From Harvard Spring: The Living Dinosaur

In early october 1989, Peter Del Tredici of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum was high on the slopes of Tian Mu Mountain Nature Reserve in western Zhejiang Province, counting ginkgo trees with two Chinese collaborators. For 1,500 years, visiting pilgrims had journeyed to this sacred mountain, where Buddhist monks in the late thirteenth century built the famous Kaishan Temple, the largest of many picturesque shrines scattered about the steep hillsides. In the cool fall weather, wrote Del Tredici, then 43, “we walked all the paths and trails in the reserve and measured and mapped the locations of all the ginkgos that we could locate. Ginkgo leaves were turning yellow, making it easy to locate the trees even at some distance.” All told, they found “167 spontaneously growing Ginkgos.” In the world of trees and botany, the finding of wild ginkgos was big news.

The Ginkgo biloba is one of the wonders of the natural world, a “living fossil” whose arboreal ancestors date back to the Jurassic period. “How or why the ginkgo managed to survive when all of its relatives went extinct is an unsolved botanical mystery,” wrote Del Tredici in Horticulture back in 1983—a mystery he would spend two decades helping to partially unravel. The term “living fossil” was coined by Darwin; in Del Tredici’s words, it refers to a living species “with a long evolutionary history and no close living relatives.” An average plant species may have an evolutionary run of a few million years; Ginkgo biloba has been around, with minimal changes, for about 56 million years.

Sharing the earth with dinosaurs, the ginkgos—often a dominant forest species—grew across the Northern Hemisphere along disturbed stream beds and levees. Then, about seven million years ago, the glaciers pushed out the last of the ginkgos in America; two million years ago, the ice pushed out the last of the ginkgos in Europe. Ultimately, Ginkgo biloba survived only in Asia.

Today, the dinosaurs are long since extinct but the ginkgo, thanks to gardeners and urban foresters, has recolonized the very continents where it once thrived, a ubiquitous, super-hardy city-tree species. Also known as the maidenhair tree, it has long been admired for its distinctive, elegant, fan-shaped leaves, and valued for its delicate nuts—but it is infamous, too, for the foul odor of its fruits, whose “fleshy outer covering [the sarcotesta],” noted Arboretum founder Charles Sprague Sargent in 1877, “exhales an extremely disagreeable smell of rancid butter.” (Others describe it as “vomitous.”) Having long outlived the pests and diseases that may have afflicted it, a ginkgo is young at 100, when most other street trees have long since died of old age or disease. This is an amazing botanical conquest and comeback.

In the late nineteenth century, when Western plant explorers descended upon China and Japan seeking botanical treasure, they were amazed at the size and antiquity of certain ginkgos: 100-foot-tall trees with 50-foot girths that were 1,000 or even 2,000 years old, growing around temples and monasteries. One of those plant men was collector Ernest H. “Chinese” Wilson, whose two China expeditions from 1907 to 1911 amassed 65,000 botanical specimens for Harvard’s arboretum. (Artfully laid out on 265 acres in Jamaica Plain, the arboretum was conceived in 1872 as both a Boston public park and a Harvard research institution, where the “Living Collections” would serve as a “Tree Museum” and a research resource. Harvard purchased the land for the arboretum and then donated it to the city of Boston, which constructed the park and leased it back to the University for a thousand years for $1 a year.)

In 1930, not long before Wilson’s death in a car accident in Worcester, this legendary botanical explorer declared in no uncertain terms that the ginkgo “no longer exists [in Asia] in a wild state, and there is no authentic record of its ever having been seen growing spontaneously. Travelers of repute of many nationalities have searched for it far and wide in the Orient but none has succeeded in solving the secret of its home….In Japan, Korea, southern Manchuria, and in China proper it is known as a planted tree only, and usually in association with religious buildings, palaces, tombs, and old historic or geomantic sites….What caused its disappearance [in the wild] we shall never know.” Such was Wilson’s clout, reported Del Tredici, that this romantic story of venerable monks preserving this ancient tree “had become dogma.” In 1967 a professor wrote in Science, “It is doubtful, however, whether a natural stand of ginkgo trees is to be found anywhere in the world today.”

Wandering the woods of Tian Mu more than two decades later, Del Tredici, who is today a senior research scientist at the arboretum, believed he had found the elusive and long-sought wild ginkgos. Locating them could help address some of the tree’s evolutionary mysteries. For Del Tredici, the ginkgo offered botanists “a unique window on the past—sort of like having a living dinosaur available to study.” He hoped to learn how this amazing species had managed to survive in the wild since the dinosaurs. How had some ginkgos lived more than a thousand years when few tree species live even hundreds of years? What served as the dispersal agent for its seeds? And what evolutionary purpose caused their fruits to smell so god-awful?



The 600 species of trees that grow in temperate North America today fall into three divisions: Pinophyta, which includes all the hundreds of conifers, or cone-bearing seed plants; Magnoliophyta, including the hundreds of broadleaf trees, whose reproduction is tied to their flowers and fruits; and Ginkgophyta, which includes only one tree, Ginkgo biloba, with a reproductive system unlike that of other trees. Although the fact that ginkgo trees are either male or female is not unusual in the tree world, this gender distinction is considered evolutionarily primitive.

“The order to which the tree belongs, the Ginkgoales,” wrote Del Tredici in Arnoldia, “can be traced back to the Permian era, almost 250 million years ago,” thanks to the study of many ginkgo fossils found in the Northern Hemisphere. “The genus Ginkgo made its first appearance in the middle Jurassic period, 170 million years ago….At least four different species of Ginkgo coexisted with the dinosaurs during the Lower Cretaceous.” One of the four species, G. adiantoides, possessed leaves and female ovules that are similar to, but smaller than, those of G. biloba, the species that exists today. In short, the ginkgo has probably existed on earth longer than any other tree now living.

The first ginkgo to grow in Europe after the Ice Age was raised from seed brought from Japan around 1730 by German physician-botanist Engelbert Kaempfer. Planted at the Botanic Garden in Utrecht, Holland, that ginkgo (which thrives to this day) was viewed simply as another rare and exotic tree from the land of the shoguns. In the ensuing decades, botanists at Kew Gardens in England, the Botanic Garden in Montpelier, France, and elsewhere on the continent planted their own rare specimens. In 1784, Philadelphian William Hamilton was delighted to be the first in his young nation to have one of these “Oriental” trees on his Woodlands estate. Naturalist William Bartram planted one nearby in his garden. Today it is the oldest ginkgo in America. But until 1896, botanists, who knew ginkgos were ancient thanks to fossilized specimens, had no idea just how old Ginkgo biloba was.

That year, on September 9 in Tokyo, Japanese botanist Sakugoro Hirase peered through his microscope at the inside of a female ginkgo tree’s ovule. The previous spring, a male ginkgo’s pollen had wafted on the wind toward a female ginkgo with many dangling pairs of round ovules. On the tip of an ovule, a secreted drop of gooey fluid captured and absorbed the pollen into an interior pollen chamber. The pollen had grown all through the summer and, as Hirase was astounded to observe, it had become a multiflagellated ginkgo sperm (three times larger than human sperm) that was swimming to fertilize a waiting egg cell.

“This was really momentous,” according to Del Tredici. “The discovery of motile sperm captured people’s attention. From the scientific point of view, motile sperm was considered to be a trait associated with evolutionarily primitive, non-seed plants such as mosses and ferns. And yet here was the ginkgo tree—clearly a seed-producing plant—with its motile sperm that linked non-seed plants to the more evolutionarily advanced conifers and angiosperms with pollen tubes and non-motile sperm. People realized, ‘My God! Ginkgo is a missing link—a living fossil.’ ”

The ginkgo tree has the same archaic reproductive system as the cycads, which predate the dinosaurs. It takes about 133 days for the ginkgo pollen to develop into sperm that then flails its way to the egg and creates a growing embryo. Soon thereafter, in the fall, the fleshy seeds, containing a hard-shelled nut with a tiny embryo, drop to the ground. Not until the next spring will the seeds germinate. Ginkgo fossils showed that the tree’s reproductive system has been largely unchanged since the Cretaceous. This “direct link with ancient fossil plants,” from before the age of flowering plants, wrote Del Tredici, “gives the modern Ginkgo biloba a pedigree unmatched by any living tree.” Thus Ginkgo was catapulted to a new status of “living fossil”—but a fossil, it was believed, that had survived only through human cultivation, whether for its delicious nuts or its status as a revered “elder.”

When Del Tredici began stalking the wild ginkgo in China in 1989, he was resuming a plant-hunting tradition at the Arnold Arboretum that had ended when “the Bamboo Curtain came down in 1949.” He worked with Nanjing Botanical Garden director Yang Guang and Chinese forester Ling Hsieh. What was hard to ignore as the three men located and measured the golden-leaved ginkgos on Tian Mu Mountain was the paucity of young trees. “Clearly,” wrote Del Tredici, “the Ginkgo population was not actively reproducing from seed under the shady, mature forest conditions that currently prevail on the mountain.” Then they learned that the local populace (and the red-bellied squirrels) had already played “an important factor limiting seedling establishment”: they had collected most of the foul-smelling fruits for the seed-kernel inside. In fact, many Chinese farmers had established ginkgo orchards in order to harvest these nuts as a cash crop.

But Del Tredici did observe something exciting and unfamiliar on Tian Mu: “[M]ost of the larger Ginkgos were reproducing vigorously from suckers arising near the base of their trunks….Wherever the base of the trunk of a large Ginkgo came into direct contact with a large rock or where its base was exposed by erosion, these structures developed…When these growths reach friable soil, they produce lateral roots, develop vigorous growing shoots, and continue their downward growth.” Where conditions were disturbed or tough, ginkgos responded by sending up new shoots from their roots that began growing into new trees. As a result, many old ginkgos have multiple trunks.

Very old ginkgos had long been observed to grow “air roots” from their upper branches. These were known in Japan as chichi (nipples, or breasts), harking back to a Japanese folk tale about an ancient ginkgo in Sendai that grew over the tomb of an emperor’s wet nurse, who vowed to Buddha that mothers who failed to lactate could pray there and would then be able to nurse their babies. Del Tredici was not seeing the aerial “breasts,” but basal chichi (lignotubers). “They had never before been described in the English literature,” he says. This helped explain how ginkgos could live so many millennia. Not only had they outlived pests and diseases, but they resprouted when under stress.

“Going to China was really a leap of faith, but that’s what science is all about,” said Del Tredici during a recent conversation in his arboretum office—an airy space of exposed brick walls, large windows overlooking many trees, two desks and two computers, his collection of old herbal medicine bottles, drawings and photos of ginkgos, and bookcases crammed with titles like Design in Nature: Learning from Trees. “When I came back I did experiments on reproduction and morphology in the lab and the greenhouse on this survival mechanism that ginkgo had evolved.” In the greenhouse, he was able to demonstrate that “basal chichi develop from suppressed cotyledonary [embryonic leaf] buds.

“To my great relief, on that first trip to China,” he said, “I found and explained the ability of ginkgos to survive so long. Even though their sexual reproduction system is archaic and doesn’t work all that well, the tree has this ability to resprout. I call it ecological immortality. Ginkgo became my case study for integrating ecological knowledge with botanical knowledge with horticultural knowledge. I was able to bring all these pieces together into a unified picture.” He was well launched on helping to unravel some of Ginkgo’s evolutionary mystery. The basal chichi helped explain the persistence of the species into the modern era and the extraordinary age of individual trees. Del Tredici’s discovery established a mechanism that has allowed this “living fossil” to survive in the wild in the face of massive ecological change.

Del Tredici’s passion for ginkgos advanced in fits and starts. A native Californian from Marin County, one of his distinct childhood memories is of 10 ginkgos planted across a neighbor’s front yard. “The thing about ginkgos,” in his view, “is you can be totally illiterate about trees and you still know what a ginkgo is.” With a B.S. in zoology from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.S. in biology from the University of Oregon, he came East to be with his girlfriend (and later, wife) while she finished Radcliffe College.

After five years at the Harvard Forest greenhouses, running what is now the Torrey Research Lab, he joined the arboretum in 1979 as an assistant plant propagator. “I was working on Sargent’s Weeping Hemlock, an old Victorian plant with a mysterious history,” he said. “I started visiting old estates and inevitably there would be these old ginkgos—100, 200 years old. So I ended up writing this article about old ginkgos.” The arboreal infatuation was heating up. Then Del Tredici discovered that just a few years earlier, in 1977, the Boston Common had lost Gardiner Greene’s ginkgo, an eighteenth-century tree so beloved it had been moved at great expense, when already 40 feet tall, from Beacon Hill to the Common in 1835.

“Believing that it is sometimes good to repeat history,” wrote Del Tredici, “I thought it would be nice to get a public-spirited Bostonian to donate a 40-foot male ginkgo [no smelly fruits!]…to fill the empty space where the tree had been.” On Arbor Day 1982, he and like-minded citizens welcomed the ginkgo to its new home. “It’s been my comeuppance,” he said ruefully of this romantic episode. “I visualized this beautiful ginkgo. Thirty years later and it’s maybe five feet taller. The site conditions are really difficult—compacted soil, on a slope, some extreme drought conditions.”

“In 1985, I had just turned 40,” said Del Tredici, “and felt I needed a new strategy, because I was getting too old to make a living with my back in the greenhouses.” He enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Boston University the next year, intending to write about black cherries. This turned out to be a somewhat more complicated subject than anticipated and one of his committee members, Lynn Margulis, impressed by a paper he had written for her evolution class about the dispersal of ginkgo seeds, suggested, “ Why don’t you do your dissertation on Ginkgo?”

“A light bulb went off,” recalled Del Tredici. “Ginkgos. Probe every little evolutionary detail and you find something unique.” At that time, many posited that dinosaurs ate ginkgo fruits and excreted the seeds, and the beasts’ demise partly explained the disappearance of wild ginkgo—but no dinosaur droppings with ginkgo seeds had ever been found.

In 1988, not long after that Ph.D. light bulb went off, Del Tredici happened to read in the Harvard Gazette that Emery professor of organic chemistry Elias J. Corey (who soon thereafter won the Nobel Prize) had just isolated a compound—ginkgolide B—that might have a medical aspect. He decided on a lark to call Corey, who said, “Come on over.” “I told him I was working on Ginkgo,” Del Tredici continued, “and that I thought it probably existed in the wild, but my question was: ‘What ecological role did Ginkgo play? How had the species survived so many millions of years? What would it look like as a wild plant? Is it a pioneer species?’ I wanted to go to China, but I didn’t know what I would find. Despite what Wilson said, there were plant hunters—including Chinese botanists—who had reported it in remote valleys, little wild remnants.

“Corey said, ‘That sounds like a great idea.’ He was working with a French pharmaceutical company that was providing ginkgo leaves for him to work on. He said, ‘Write your letter describing your project and I’ll write one in support and we’ll put them in the mail at the same time.’ In a month or so, I had a check for $5,000. That was a lot of money in those days. All the French wanted was that I write a book chapter for them.”

While working on Tian Mu in 1989, Del Tredici was persuaded he was seeing wild ginkgos because the trees were mixed in with the natural forest, the sex ratios were normal (half female, half male), and the trees were single or multistemmed and looked as if they had grown from seed. Equally exciting was his discovery of basal chichi.

And then there was the mystery of the stinky fruits. On that trip to China, he learned that local nocturnal scavengers and carnivores like Chinese leopard cats and the masked palm civet ate the ginkgo’s fruit. He hypothesized that the stinky flesh mimicked the smell of rotting meat, a successful strategy to attract these creatures. The ginkgo nuts, in turn, were eventually excreted, and were far likelier to sprout and grow if dropped in sunny sites. Back in Boston, in various experiments and field trials, Del Tredici confirmed that ginkgo seed germination rates soared (71 percent versus 15 percent) minus the smelly sarcotesta (as would happen when eaten and excreted). “During the Cretaceous,” he wrote, “potential dispersal agents included mammals, birds, and carnivorous dinosaurs.”

As cumbersome as G. biloba’s sex life is, it, too, has served an evolutionary purpose. As Del Tredici and other botanists studied the tree’s reproductive cycle, he began conducting experiments at the arboretum—both in the greenhouse and outdoors—growing seeds from Guizhou and Boston ginkgos, further confirming that all “aspects of Ginkgo’s sexual reproductive cycle are strongly influenced by temperature.” During the Ice Age, he wrote in a review paper, “Such a trait would have allowed this species to reproduce successfully in regions of the Northern Hemisphere that were undergoing dramatic cooling after a long period of stable warm conditions…Ginkgo biloba’s temperature-sensitive embryo developmental-delay mechanism could well have been another climate-induced Cretaceous innovation—an evolutionarily primitive, but ecologically functional, form of seed dormancy.” Ginkgo seeds do not try to grow until the weather favors their survival. Between 1953 and 2000 in Japan, the temperature-sensitive Ginkgo adjusted to the warming climate by extending its growing period: four days earlier each spring and eight days longer in the fall.

Like “Chinese” Wilson, Peter Del Tredici loved botanizing in China, a place he has visited eight more times and calls “Horticultural Heaven.” He has worked with many Chinese colleagues, and said they have now taken the lead in researching ginkgo, a national symbol of their botanical heritage. Ginkgo DNA is three times larger than human DNA and is unlikely to be fully sequenced anytime soon, but by using smaller snippets for DNA testing in 2008, botanist Wei Gong and her colleagues confirmed Del Tredici’s 1989 find of wild ginkgo growing on the slopes of Tian Mu Mountain. The Chinese also confirmed that several other small wild ginkgo remnants displayed “a significantly higher degree of genetic diversity than populations in other parts of the country.” In some of these forests, growing near peoples with no history of gathering ginkgo fruits, there are young ginkgos growing. Although no one knows for sure where Ginkgo originated, it’s now clear that during the Ice Age, the southwest mountains of China served as refugia. Subsequent DNA studies have also shown that China is the ultimate source of all the world’s cultivated ginkgos.

Many of Ginkgo’s mysteries are probably unsolvable. Did it once have a pollinator? We will never truly know, said Del Tredici, “why Ginkgo is still around when all of its relatives have gone extinct…many of its life-history traits evolved under conditions that no longer exist, which makes reconstructing its ecological niche difficult to establish.” What, for instance, he continued, were “its original dispersal agents? What role did the medically active chemicals it produces play in its evolution? Were they feeding deterrents? I assume Ginkgo survived because it was somehow able to remain competitive with flowering plants, but in what ways was it different from species that went extinct? For all intents and purposes, Ginkgo has stopped evolving.”

For decades now, Del Tredici has been gathering ginkgo seeds and cuttings from historic and unusual trees, and he recently planted a large hillside in the arboretum with some of his more prized specimens, part of a larger grove of young trees that are all deciduous gymnosperms: larches, golden larches, dawn redwoods, and bald cypresses. He expects that when Harvard has to renegotiate the lease for the arboretum in 861 years, the ginkgos will be looking pretty magnificent.

Until then, when next you pass a ginkgo on a busy street, remember you are looking at a mysterious species that shared the earth with dinosaurs. “As remarkable as Ginkgo’s evolutionary survival is,” said Del Tredici, “the fact that it grows vigorously in the modern urban environment is no less dramatic. Having survived the climatic vicissitudes of the past 120 million years, ginkgo is clearly well prepared—or, more precisely, preadapted—to handle the climatic uncertainties that seem to be looming in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, should the human race succeed in wiping itself out over the course of the next few centuries, we can take some comfort in the knowledge that the ginkgo tree will survive.”  

Historian Jill Jonnes, author of Eiffel’s Tower, Conquering Gotham, and Empires of Light, is a scholar this fall at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, working on trees as green infrastructure.

22 and 23 Oct, Denver Museum of Nature and Science

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science invites families and visitors of all ages to enjoy a Cretaceous Dinosaur Carnival from 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 22, and Sunday, Oct. 23. The event celebrates the Museum’s new temporary exhibition T. Rex Encounter, which features robotic, interactive dinosaurs and a fossil cast of the most complete T. Rex ever discovered. Participants will experience dinosaur fun throughout the Museum, including dinosaur-themed carnival games, dinosaur art projects, life-size dinosaur skeleton puppets and more. For details visit www.dmns.org/t-rex.

UK: 25 OCtober, 2011: Dinosaurs at Lynn Museum family event

From Lynn News: Dinosaurs at Lynn Museum
A DEADLY Dinosaur family event will be held at the Lynn Museum next Tuesday, October 25.


Visitors can learn all about the fierce creatures which once roamed the Earth millions of years ago, handle real fossils, travel the Dino Trail and create their a dinosaur of their own to take home.

A Hallowe’en family drop-in day with a theme of Creepy Collections will take place on Thursday, October 27.

Suitable for all the family, visitors will be able to find out about the creepy objects that lurk in the Lynn Museum stores.

They can view real Witch Bottles and creepy crawlies, including beetles and insects from around the world. Brave individuals can try the Hallowe’en Trial Challenge, and children can make spooky crafts inspired by what they’ve seen to take home.

Both events run from 11am to 2pm at the Lynn Museum next to the Lynn bus station.

There is no need to book and all are welcome to go along. The cost is £1 per child, including museum admission.

For more information, phone 01553 775001.

Dinosaur speed demon not for turning

From IrishTimes.com: Dinosaur speed demon not for turning

A SPEEDY, seven-metre-long, meat-eating dinosaur that stalked South America in its heydey appears to have had an enormously strong tail that boosted its speed, according to a new study.

Carnotaurus had a huge tail muscle that made it one of the fastest hunters of its time, according to researcher Scott Persons, a graduate student in palaeontology at the University of Alberta in Canada.

The paper, published in PLoS One , dubs Carnotaurus sastrei a “dinosaur speed demon” and details findings from computer modelling which suggest that long rib-like bones, along the length of the dinosaur’s tail, could have supported a huge muscle.

While the muscular tail may have meant Carnotaurus couldn’t turn too deftly, it may have boosted the twin-horned dinosaur’s ability to cover ground.

“The results of the digital muscle reconstruction suggest that what C. sastrei lacked in turning ability, it may have made up for in overall speed and acceleration,” write the study authors.

But perhaps that straight trajectory gave the dinosaur’s would-be prey a get-out-of-jail card, surmised Persons in a statement. “The tail was rigid, making it difficult for the hunter to make quick, fluid turns,” he says.

“Imagine yourself as a small plant-eating dinosaur on the floodplains of prehistoric Argentina, and you are unlucky enough to find yourself being charged by a hungry Carnotaurus . Your best bet is to make a lot of quick turns, because you couldn’t beat Carnotaurus in a straight sprint.”

Happy Birthday, Haddie!

From the Haddonfield Patch: Happy Birthday, Haddie!
A real Hadrosaurus dinosaur would have slightly more candles on its cake, but for Haddonfield's Hadrosaurus, October marks its eighth birthday.

Haddonfield's Hadrosaurus statue, affectionately known as Haddie, was erected in October 2003 at Kings Highway and Chestnut Street.

From May 2011: The Making of a Dinosaur
By now, you’d think everyone in South Jersey knows about, and can recognize, Hadrosaurus foulkii. For that, thanks go to several groups, especially the Haddonfield Garden Club and John Giannotti, an artist and sculptor who donated his talent and time to design and create the critter.

Seemingly climbing through a bed of large river rocks, Haddie even had Lantern Lane renamed in her honor soon after she was installed with great fanfare in 2003.

Giannotti recently talked about the process that went into the sculpture during an afternoon meeting of the Haddon Fortnightly. Living in Haddonfield, on West End Avenue, Giannotti said he was so proud of his town that he wanted to use his skills to put a recognizable “face” on the duck bill dinosaur.

No, it wasn’t named after the town where the first known fossils of the beast were recovered in 1838. Hadrosaurus is the name of the genus that includes the vegetarian beast.

Giannotti, former chairman of Rutgers University’s Fine Arts Department, did more than donate his labor. He encouraged elementary school students to visit him in his barn turned studio to plop a handful of clay onto the model. The clay then was worked into the texture of the skin of the model.

The group Haddonfield Acts to Create Haddrosaurus foulkii (HATCH) raised the $54,000 needed to complete the statue. Giannotti said the market price at the time would have been about $150,000 if he billed for his work.

“I wanted to make a model as large as possible for its space,” he said and the relied on the only true bones of the dinosaur, discovered in a marl pit at the foot of Maple Avenue in 1858. “We didn’t have much, just 47 bones and just one cheek bone from the head,” he said. Pieces of a femur, a calf bone, some toes, and bits of a tail help define the size of the dinosaur.

“There had been some bones found in England, but no one knew what it was. They thought it might be a hippopotamus and there were some leg sockets that indicated how it stood,” he said.

Six hundred local children, from kindergarten through fifth grade, visited the studio as Giannotti worked. Many wrote him follow-up notes, which he has kept, and drew pictures of what they thought the animal would look like.

In addition to the school children, he said, guests visiting Giannotti and his wife, Antoinette–who grew up in town–smacked plastiline onto the work. A bridal party once visited the studio, and the bride and groom climbed on Haddie’s back for their wedding photo. He said one of the children, now grown, stopped by the sculpture with his girlfriend recently and had her peer under the belly of the statue to see “his spot.”

And carved into another part of the underbelly is “DEL,” the nickname of the Giannotti’s son, Delano, now a freshman at Haddonfield Memorial High School.

The artist decided the skin of the dinosaur should be patterned and tinted, so there are brown and green markings on it, created by chemical applications.

“No one had ever made a close-to-life-size sculpture of this animal. There were bones made out of plaster of a Hadrosaurus at the Trenton State Museum, but they put a skull on it that was completely wrong.”

Some archaeologists and paleontologists thought the dinosaur should have a large plume on her head, but then they realized the animal had four toes and no dinosaurs with four toes were plumed.

“Think about the practicalities of a commission like this,” Giannotti said to the women’s club members. Based on bone measurements, a full-sized replica wouldn’t fit in the allotted space, so he planned a 75 percent reconstruction. Even with the reduction in size, the sculpture needed 2,600 pounds of bronze to create the likeness that would rest on two hind legs, one foreleg, and tail.

“It was like building a boat. A steel framework, covered with plywood, wrapped in cloth” and eventually covered with wax, a ceramic slurry and rubber to create the mold for the sculpture that is 3/8-inch thick.

Along the way, the 1,500 pounds of clay were dumped back into the big pot and the steel was scrapped. “At four bucks a pound you can’t use it just once,” he said.

Eighteen separate sections had to be soldered. “You can’t make a 17-foot-long sculpture in one pour,” Giannotti noted.

The bronze was melted in a 2,000-degree oven. Once poured, the statue was baked in a 1,600-degree oven.

Giannotti said he remembers clearly the day the statute was installed. “Usually there’s not much fanfare because there’s a later unveiling. We came up Kresson Road (hauling Haddie on a truck) and were met by fire trucks and police cars. Children’s groups were at the site, many of the, who had been in my studio. We dropped her by a crane into the site,” and it fit perfectly on the first try.

Giannotti later selected 24 of the children’s drawings and matched each to an artist, asking for an interpretation that would be displayed at an exhibit at the Markeim Arts Center.

The artist said he doesn’t mind if people touch the sculpture or pose with it, but “I don’t want it dressed for Halloween. That’s disrespectful.”

“It’s been 60 million years since this animal walked around here. It’s kind of hard to get a likeness. And doesn’t everybody in town want to find the head?”

One of Giannotti’s more recent works has been installed at the Camden Shipyard and Maritime Museum. It depicts Matthew Henson, an African-American, who accompanied Robert Peary when he climbed to the North Pole in 1909. Henson’s rule in that exploration was not acknowledged until 1937. The sculpture includes one of the dogs used in the exploration.

Other local works by Giannotti include the shark series near the Hopkins House Art Gallery on Cooper River Parkway—shark fins seeming to cut through the field—and the Victims of Terrorism memorial on the other side of the Cooper River.

Distributed at the Haddon Fortnightly meeting was a brochure written by Jacob Peacock last year as a project for his Eagle Scout recognition. It includes a 3-mile walking tour of Haddonfield with nine historic sites.

Arkansas: 2-feet long footprints found

From The Nation: 2-feet long footprints found
RESEARCHERS at the University of Arkansas are studying a new field of fossilised dinosaur tracks, including one set which appears to be from a large three-toed predator.
The tracks were found on private land in south-west Arkansas and provide a window into the lifeforms which roamed the area as long as 120 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous period. Researchers say the dinosaurs who left them probably included giant predators, such as Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, an early cousin of T Rex.

There are also large, long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs such as Pleurocoelus and Paluxysaurus, who may have been easy prey. ‘The quality of the tracks and the length of the trackways make this an important site,’ said Stephen K Boss, who led the project. The research effort is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Based on the rock in which the footprints were found, researchers have a good idea of what the climate would have been like, Mr Boss said.

‘Picture an environment much like that of the shores of the Persian Gulf today. The air temperature was hot. The water was shallow and very salty,’ he said. ‘It was a harsh environment. We’re not sure what the animals were doing here, but clearly they were here in some abundance.’ Some of the tracks in the field have not been documented before in Arkansas. The researchers’ work will expand knowledge about dinosaurs which roamed the area and the climate during the period.

Troop 842 Travels back in Time

From the San Elmo Fairfield Patch: Police Report. http://sananselmofairfax.patch.com/articles/san-anselmo-police-juvenile-hit-fire-hydrant-roommate-trying-to-steal-car

Hit and Run: A truck transporting a large dinosaur was traveling head on into a resident’s car on Foss Avenue at 12:12 p.m. When it drove past, the tail of the dinosaur hit the resident’s car, causing damage.

This is all the news that was given! I sure would like to know who was transporting the dinosaur, why, to where, and what kind of dinosaur it was!

Behind the Lines: Dinosaurs at work

From The Salt Lake Tribune: An Op Ed : Behind the Lines: Dinosaurs at work
Welcome to Behind the Lines, a weekly conversation with Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist Pat Bagley and BYU economist Val Lambson.

GO TO THE ORIGINAL LINK TO SEE THE CARTOON - WHICH FEATURES A T-REX SKELETON HOLDIGN UP A "WELCOME BACK TOURIST$ SIGN" WHILE A SHORT MAN (HERBERT) SAYS "I REALLY HATE TO THANK DARWINISTS AND WOODROW WILSON AND OBAMA AND THE STIMULUS FOR BRINGING JOBS TO EASTERN UTAH, SO I WON'T.

Bagley: For the genesis of this week’s “Behind the Lines” cartoon I have to thank Tom Wharton. Tom wandered over from his Tribune “Outdoors” desk and shared his experience of attending the reopening of the quarry site in Dinosaur National Monument. The original quarry building was closed in 2006 when pieces of it began narrowly missing some of the more than 300,000 annual visitors who came to see the enclosed rock face holding thousands of dinosaur bones. There were no plans to rebuild. One of Utah’s premier tourist sites was off-limits until funds suddenly became available through the 2009 Obama stimulus.


Tom noted that Utah Gov. Gary Herbert never mentioned that fact in his speech at the reopening, though he played up the importance of the building to the local tourist economy. I give Herbert lumps in this cartoon, but he is merely doing what many other GOP politicians have done who were critical of The Stimulus. They complain loudly about how it doesn’t create jobs, then show up at the ribbon cutting to take credit for the jobs it created.

Lambson: I am as interested in dinosaurs as the next red-blooded American, and I am opposed to pieces of the quarry building falling on visitors. (This states the obvious, but we liberty-lovers get accused of so many things!) Your clever cartoon has a hidden metaphor, however. The notion that temporary stimulus packages create jobs on net is a dinosaur that should be extinct. Unfortunately, it is not and does a lot of damage while it thrashes around. The funds did not suddenly become available by magic; they came from somewhere else. People who push for government spending tend to have this in common: they emphasize benefits and underestimate or ignore costs. That’s how we got iProvo, light rail, and so on and on and on.

'Flying Monsters': Dinosaurs take to the air in IMAX film

From Oregon Live: 'Flying Monsters': Dinosaurs take to the air in IMAX film

Flying Monsters
When: 11 a.m., 2 and 6 p.m.
Where: Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, 1945 S.E. Water Ave.
Tickets: $8.50; $6.50 for youths, students with ID and people 63 and older.

Picture something the body size of a giraffe. Now imagine that its spindly, longer front legs are joined to its shorter back legs by a thin membrane of wing. Now erase the giraffe's head and replace it with one something like a stork's, with a tapering beak the size of a human.

What you have isn't the result of some fantasy illustrator's fever dream, but rather Quetzalcoatlus, the largest flying creature ever and the star of the new IMAX film "Flying Monsters," which opened Friday at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry's Omnimax theater.

It's the latest in the seemingly infinite series of projects from the mind of British naturalist David Attenborough, and focuses on the dinosaurs that soared above their leaden brethren. When we think of dinosaurs, it's the tyrannosaurs, brontosaurs and velociraptors that get most of the press, but as "Flying Monsters" makes clear, their aerial counterparts were just as fascinating and unusual.

The movie uses sophisticated and vivid computer animation, in conjunction with Attenborough's avuncular, familiar narration, to trace the development of winged dinosaurs, or pterosaurs, from their first appearance 220 million years ago. Although the film will be shown at OMSI in 2-D rather than the 3-D in which it was filmed, it's still an immersive, impressive experience, even if you're sometimes too aware of the extra missing dimension.

In one segment, bits of fossilized skeleton emerge from a hunk of rock and form themselves into a coherent whole, offering insight into how paleontologists depict an entire creature based on a few bone fragments. In another, we see how computer modeling of a pterosaur's movement can show whether it spent most of its time walking, flying or hanging. Again, a valuable illustration of the work scientists do.

In fact, what makes "Flying Monsters" stand out among the IMAX science-film set is its sophistication and its unwillingness to dumb the material down or settle for eye-popping spectacle. An essay on the website boingboing.net a couple of weeks ago decried the lack of exhibits geared above a grade-school level in science museums. This film is a solid corrective to that trend, which is not to say that children won't enjoy it, but that the emphasis is on methodology and facts as much as on cool-looking beasts gliding over magnificent landscapes.

And some of the facts about Quetzalcoatlus are quite astounding. I spoke with Douglas A. Lawson, the paleontologist who first unearthed a quetzal bone in Texas in 1971 (and is interviewed in the movie), to verify some of the more outrageous-seeming claims. For instance, the film depicts the creatures soaring above the clouds in the sort of image you'd expect in an ad for Quetzalcoatlus Airlines. It also claims estimates of a flight speed of 85 to 100 mph, and a range of up to 10,000 miles (or more than halfway around the Earth) in a single flight.

Really?

"They couldn't get to any higher elevation than regular birds like condors, say 10,000 feet or so," Lawson says. "There were some rather high escarpments they could have launched from, but it seems unlikely. Also, it's physically possible that they might not be torn to bits if they flew that fast, but it wouldn't be pleasant. And, again, there might be the possibility that their metabolism would allow them to fly as far as 10,000 miles under optimum conditions, but I don't know if that ever happened. There's no evidence of pterosaur migration, although that doesn't mean it didn't happen."

And what about the possibility that a special sense enabled them to sense the thermal updrafts they needed to stay aloft for long periods?

"There's no evidence of that, and I expect they relied upon visual evidence like the color of the ground to know where those spots would be. The only animal which has a thermal sense like that is the pit viper, which only evolved the ability to spot warm-blooded prey."

Despite a few questionable efforts, then, at exaggerating the already impressive résumé of the quetzal, "Flying Monsters" does a solid job of illuminating a relatively obscure chapter of the dinosaur saga.

Dinosaur renaissance: A new look at old creatures in Utah

From The Salt Lake Tribune, Lifestyle: Dinosaur renaissance: A new look at old creatures in Utah

For creatures that wandered through Utah millions of years ago, dinosaurs certainly are making news these days.

Whether paleontologists are announcing the discovery of a new species, or working a dig in places such as Hanksville, Moab, Emery County or the Uinta Basin, or buildings and exhibits are either being rebuilt or constructed from scratch, dinosaurs are enjoying a renaissance in Utah.

The state already featured what is billed as the world’s largest display of mounted dinosaurs at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, the world’s best collection of dinosaur tracks at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm and the densest concentration of Jurassic-aged dinosaurs ever found at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in Emery County.

In all, there are 13 facilities that display dinosaur fossils, bones or recreations, and there are many sites on public lands where paleontologists are opening new digs and species are being discovered.

"Utah is so famous for our landscape and our snow, but we are also really famous for our dinosaurs," said Tim Lee, a designer for the new Natural History Museum of Utah. "As a state, our educational institutions are starting to realize that. People outside of Utah are interested in that. We have an amazing geologic record of time. These dinosaurs once populated our state."

New and restored facilities that are already complete or coming on line in the near future will allow dinosaur enthusiasts to gain even more knowledge about these ancient reptiles.

At Dinosaur National Monument near Vernal, the famous Quarry Wall filled with about 1,500 exposed dinosaur bones representing 400 creatures reopened last week for the first time since 2006. The building protecting one of the world’s most famous dinosaur sites has been restored and improved with better access and interpretive exhibits.

The Natural History Museum of Utah will be opening its new $100 million state-of-the-art facility on Salt Lake City’s east bench on Nov. 18. It will include a "Past Worlds Zone" to display some of its famous dinosaur collection.

With a $1.5 million loan from the Uintah County Special Service Impact District, ground will soon be broken on a new laboratory and repository for eastern Utah dinosaur bones as part of the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park facility in Vernal. The facility could be ready for use as soon as next spring.

The Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum — formerly the CEU Museum — in Price is reworking its main dinosaur exhibit and its famous Utahraptor to reflect new trends and discoveries in the field of paleontology.

"Anything new in the world of dinosaurs can cause a buzz," said Christine Trease, director of public relations for the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum.

In Utah, that buzz is almost a roar right now.

The excitement started with the reopening of the Quarry Exhibit Hall and new visitor center at Dinosaur National Monument last week. The quarry wall allows visitors to see the dinosaur bones uncovered but still embedded in the rock in which they were found. The quarry has produced fossils from all four major late-Jurassic dinosaur groups: plant-eating sauropods, stegasaurs, ornithopods and flesh-eating theropods.

Veteran monument paleontologist Dan Chure, who first came here in 1979, called the wall "a library of dinosaur bones. Coming here is a pilgrimage for many schools. ... This is the heart and soul of Dinosaur."

In nearby Vernal, Steve Sroka, manager of the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park, said the new laboratory and repository planned to be a part of that facility will consist of 12,000 square feet of space and have a viewing area where the public can watch paleontologists prepare fossils and exhibits. Many of the fossils are found in the area.

Then there is the new Natural History Museum of Utah, one of the most expensive facilities of its kind to open in the state. Its dinosaur exhibit will include a 30-foot-long "trophy wall" featuring about 15 ceratopsans — horned dinosaurs — many of which were discovered in Utah.

Digging Up Activities for National Dinosaur Month

From Hillsborough Patch: Digging Up Activities for National Dinosaur Month
There's a time for everything, including dinosaurs.

Though the ancient—and enormous—beasts ruled thousands and thousands of years ago, October is the month modern humans focus on them.


(First I've heard of it!)

Kids celebrate earth science week

From Tulsa World: Kids celebrate earth science week
More than 60 children, most between the ages of 4 and 7, spent Wednesday afternoon at the Tulsa Geoscience Center learning about earth science - even though they probably didn't realize it.

The students were busy making replicas of fossils, playing with bubbles, touching dinosaur teeth and being mesmerized by insects and rocks that glow under fluorescent lights.

The Geoscience Center teamed up with the Tulsa Children's Museum to offer hands-on projects and activities at different stations for children Wednesday and Thursday during earth science week.

Wednesday's projects were geared toward younger children and focused on fossils and bubbles. Thursday's activities for older children will highlight the importance of recycling, the use of everyday petroleum products and making recyclable art projects.

Earth "is where we live. They need to understand as much as they can about it," said Susan Henley, director of the Tulsa Geoscience Center. "All the earth systems like weather, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis - understand why they're happening."

Brena Meadows, an outreach coordinator for the children's museum, brought the mobile exhibit Pop! Art and Science of Bubbles, which explores bubbles and the properties of air and water.

"They are exploring water. Part of earth science is hydro science. As they play with bubbles, they learn how water works," Meadows said.

Watching the students put the pieces together and learn at the different stations is Henley's favorite part.

"They love making these discoveries," she said, using the fossil station as an example when the kids examine tyrannosaurus teeth and mammoth teeth. "They come to the conclusion some animals are meat eaters, some are plant eaters, all from the shape of the tooth."

Megan Linn and Nicole Taulman, who homeschool their children in Owasso, came for the earth science activities Wednesday.

"We like to do a whole lot of hands-on activities," said Linn, who spent about two hours at the center with her 7- and 5-year-old daughters. "This is the reason we homeschool. We can take advantage of these resources. We get to come and learn and pass it on to the children."

The fact that the Tulsa Geoscience Center is free is another advantage.

The center, which offers free tours to school groups and Boy and Girl Scout troops, is funded partially with donations. As operating costs continue to rise, Henley hopes that the tours can remain free.



Tulsa Geoscience Center
What: Free field trips to classes, Boy and Girl Scout troops and teacher training courses related to earth sciences, geology and geophysics.

Where: 610 S. Main St.

When: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. Tours also can be scheduled by appointment.

Cost: Free, but donations are accepted

For more: 918-392-4556 or tulsaworld.com/tulsageosciencecenter

Note: The Tulsa Children's Museum is "a museum without walls" that offers traveling exhibits, workshops, classes and concerts. For more on the museum and its programs, call 918-295-8144 or go online to tulsaworld.com/tulsachildrensmuseum

Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20111013_19_A11_CUTLIN570719

Yep. Krakens.

From The Mark: Yep. Krakens.
An American paleontologist claims that a giant, prehistoric marine invertebrate that can only really be described as a "kraken" (seriously) killed nine marine dinosaurs and arranged their remains into a self-portrait in a region in Nevada known for its fossils. This is, let us say, freaking awesome, if true. Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College says the remains of nine 45-foot-long icthyosaurs found in Nevada's Berlin-Icthyosaur State Park were arranged to look somewhat like a giant, 100-foot-long octopus-like creature that is believed to have ruled much of the seas that covered inland North America during the Triassic era. These massive "krakens" were believed to have been among the most intelligent invertebrates to have ever lived on the planet. McMenamin says one of these enormous creatures likely killed the ichtyosaurs then dragged them to his territory before arranging the decomposed dinosaur's vertebrae into what looked like tentacles with sucker discs on each of them. If McMenamin is right, then the remains would be the earliest-known self-portrait on the planet. Even if he's not right, it's still pretty insane that giant, 100-foot long octopi routinely killed dinosaurs the size of school buses.

Also:
From Io9: Giant prehistoric krakens may have sculpted self-portraits using ichthyosaur bones

For decades, paleontologists have puzzled over a fossil collection of nine Triassic icthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) discovered in Nevada's Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Researchers initially thought that this strange grouping of 45-foot-long marine reptiles had either died en masse from a poisonous plankton bloom or had become stranded in shallow water.

But recent geological analysis of the fossil site indicates that the park was deep underwater when these shonisaurs swam the prehistoric seas. So why were their bones laid in such a bizarre pattern? A new theory suggests that a 100-foot-long cephalopod arranged these bones as a self-portrait after drowning the reptiles. And no, we're not talking about Cthulhu.

After considering the more brutal aspects of modern octopus predation, paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College came to the conclusion that the shonisaur remains had been deposited in a "kraken" lair by its massive, tentacled squatter. From his abstract of research being presented today at The Geological Society of America's annual meeting:

We hypothesize that the shonisaurs were killed and carried to the site by an enormous Triassic cephalopod, a "kraken," with estimated length of approximately 30 m, twice that of the modern Colossal Squid Mesonychoteuthis. In this scenario, shonisaurs were ambushed by a Triassic kraken, drowned, and dumped on a midden like that of a modern octopus. Where vertebrae in the assemblage are disarticulated, disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity. Close fitting due to spinal ligament contraction is disproved by the juxtaposition of different-sized vertebrae from different parts of the vertebral column. The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in biserial patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle. The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each amphicoelous vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. Thus the tessellated vertebral disc pavement may represent the earliest known self‑portrait.

McMenamin anticipates that this theory will be met with skepticism, as the fleshy body of a giant Triassic octopus wouldn't fossilize well. But the possibility of finding that which is essentially a gargantuan mollusk's macaroni illustration? That's the kind of glorious crazy you hope is reality.