November 2001
"Evolution" on PBS
I hope you all had the chance to watch this series during the last week of September. It ran for 8 hours over 4 nights. The first episodes showed Darwin and his discovery of evolution by natural selection and the objections that he met. Believe it or not, the same arguments are often used today even after the discovery of so much scientific information that answers those questions. Questions about the complexity of the eye indicating a higher being’s creation can be explained as a series of natural changes over time. The part about the evolution of whales included information from the article below. The missing link fossils were also used as an argument against natural selection. But indeed we have found many missing link fossils as illustrated by the whale evolution and Jenny Clack’s first tetrapod fossils also seen in the show. It was interesting that she can now show that legs evolved before animals moved to land. I was also impressed with their explanation of sex as a supplier of the variety needed for evolution to occur. The upcoming sixth extinction makes us the "ultimate weed" species by habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, poaching and the introduction of foreign species. The part about the mutating microorganisms and their success against our antibiotics was indeed scary. They can change much faster than we can create. I must say that the last segment gave me shivers as the Wheaton COLLEGE students explored "science" and the professors signed forms about Adam and Eve. I saw a flashback to the Darwin days. And when they showed the ark model with the plastic pairs of animals lined up including dinosaurs, I thought that must have been one huge ark.
Huge Pterosaurs Found in Romania & Spain
A pterosaur with a 40 foot wingspan that soared over Romania 70 MYA has been found. Its skull may have been 10 feet long. When the fossil was found 15 years ago, it was thought to be a dinosaur because of its size. The skull may have measured 10 feet long and was very sturdy in spite of its hollow bones. Another fragmentary specimen from Spain appears to be almost as large. Both appear to outrank the large pterosaur found in Texas (a Pteranodon with a 24 foot wingspan that was featured in JP III). All three specimens belong to the azhdarchid family. In general pterosaurs seem to come in all sizes with some of them evidently growing very large. It is believed that they grew very fast and under the right conditions grew very big. Pterosaurs died out 65 MYA along with the dinosaurs.
Meave Leakey’s Kenya Man
Did you see the beautiful article in the October issue of National Geographic? It shows the skull of Kenyanthropus platyops (flat-faced Kenya Man) that is different from Australopithecus (including A. afarensis - Lucy), but lived at the same time (3.5 to 3.2 MYA). The skull pieces were painstakingly collected and put together over a year and a half. Meave interprets this specimen as indicating that when hominids moved onto two legs and went upright, there were several species that arose. Now there is only one.
Mazon Creek Millipede Identified
An article by Joseph Hannibal from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History redefines a Mazon Creek fossil as a millipede. Historically, there have been problems with the identification of millipedes that can look like coiled fossil fern parts, crustaceans, shrimp, and segmented worms. In this case, there were two concretions both from the Francis Creek Shale at Braidwood that had been identified as Archiulus glomeratus. One is now determined to be a crustacean Acanthotelson stimpsonii (a common Mazon Creek syncarid shrimp) and the other is identified as a millipede in the genus Xyloiulus. It is interesting that these were found and named in the 1890s and only now after a reexamination have they been reclassified. I wonder what might be found by further study in our large collection of Mazon Creek concretions?!
New Book – "Dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight"
A whole book on dinosaurs from the Isle of Wight!? Yes. It was edited by David Martill and Darren Naish and covers a lot of ground. There is a historical review (William Bucklund found the first dino bones there of Iguanodon in 1829) and the story of the Mesozoic geology and the dinosaurs and pterosaurs of the island. They cover 24 species and some new material from the Lower Cretaceous Wealden Group. Theropods include Baryonyx (a Spinosaurid), Neovenator (an Allosaurid), Aristosuchus (a Compsognathid), and the new Eotyrannus (a Tyrannosaurid). A lot of the material is quite fragmentary.
Arctic Circle Human Traces Found
It has been thought that humans did not reach the northern areas of Europe because of the glacial climate. However, stone artifacts, animal bones, and carved mammoth tusks have now been found in the Russian Arctic that are dated to 40,000 YA. This may mean that Neanderthals lived much further north than thought or that modern humans moved far north much quicker than thought. Neanderthals lived from 100,000 YA until about 30,000 YA and modern humans are believed to have started into southern Europe about 40,000 YA. The stone tools are not diagnostic and resemble Middle Paleolithic Mousterian and earliest Upper Paleolithic. This means that the climate was probably relatively dry and ice-free open grasslands in that area. Temperature estimates predict that the temperature was probably about 10 degrees C colder than today. Whichever group it was it shows that humans were able to live in those conditions.
Karen Nordquist, ESCONI Paleontology Study Group
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