This is Dacentrurus, believed to be the newly described dinosaur’s closest relative. Image: Jaime A. Headden via Wikimedia Commons.
The Natural History Museum in London has a post about a newly described Stegosaur. This animal lived about 168 million years ago, during the middle Jurassic, in what is now the Middle Atlas mountains of Morocco. It's the first stegosaur found in North Africa and is called Adratiklit boulahfa. The paper describing it appeared in the journal Science Direct.
All that is left of the animal is a handful of vertebrae and an upper arm bone, but those were enough for a team a palaeontologists to confidently identify not only a new species but a new genus.
The study was led by Dr Susannah Maidment, a Museum dinosaur expert, in collaboration with colleagues from Morocco.
Susie says, 'The discovery of A. boulahfa is particularly exciting as we have dated it to the Middle Jurassic.
'Most known stegosaurs date from later in the Jurassic Period, making this the oldest definite stegosaur described and helping to increase our understanding of the evolution of this group of dinosaurs.'
It is named Adratiklit boulahfa from the Berber words for mountain (Adras) and lizard (tiklit). The species name, boulahfa, refers to where the specimen was found.
Credit: Getty Images
Scientific American has an article about fossil dinosaur eggs. A new find, which consisted of about 15 nests and more than 50 eggs, was found in what is now the Gobi Desert. It dates to the late Cretaceous, about 80 million years ago and shows evidence of gregarious behavior. All the details appeared in a paper in the Journal Nature.
An exquisitely preserved dinosaur nesting site discovered in the Gobi Desert shows that some of these prehistoric animals nested in groups and, like birds, protected their eggs.
“Dinosaurs are often portrayed as solitary creatures that nested on their own, buried their eggs and then just went away,” says François Therrien, a palaeontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology near Calgary, Canada. He co-authored a study published this month in Geology describing the find. “But here we show that some dinosaurs were much more gregarious. They came together and established a colony that they likely protected,” Therrien says.
There's a new episode of the Palaeocast podcast. This one is about the strange "Small Shelly Fossils" that are found at the base of the Cambrian.
Between the weird and wonderful rangeomorphs of the Ediacaran Period and the world-famous palaeocommunities of the Burgess Shale, the ‘Early Cambrian’ is host to a ‘waste basket’ of fossils untied by their small size and shelly construction.
These small shelly fossils (SSFs) aren’t just a single group of animals, but represent several different invertebrate phyla. Further compounding the difficulty of their identification, each SSF, termed a ‘sclerite’, is part of a larger composite skeleton known as a ‘sclerotome’. Whilst some complete sclerotomes have been preserved, many SSFs still represent multiple jigsaws thrown together and the pictures lost.
Piecing the SSFs back together and building a picture of the Earliest Cambrian is Dr Marissa Betts of the University of New England, Australia. Her work on the SSFs have provided a new framework for the regional stratigraphy of Australia and in this interview, we discuss why this was necessary, how she went about it and finally, what we know about the animals themselves.
The National Fossil Day has a page with events planned for on and near the actual date of Wednesday, October 16th, 2019. There's quite a few events listed and an interesting one listed for Illinois. The Lauer Foundation and the Cosley Zoo in Wheaton, IL are holding an event on Saturday, October 19th, 2019. There will be Mazon Creek fossils, including the Illinois State Fossil Tully Monster. Additionally, they plan to have shark teeth and dinosaur teeth and bones. It should be a great time! Here are all the details.
Celebrate National Fossil Day
Lauer Foundation for Paleontology, Science and Education and the Cosley Zoo
Join The Lauer Foundation and Cosley Zoo on Saturday October 19, 2019 to Celebrate National Fossil Day.
See first hand some of Illinois’ famous Mazon Creek fossils, including the state fossil the Tully Monster. Also see Megalodon shark teeth and dinosaur teeth and bones. Learn about fossils and geology. Have a chance to touch real fossils and take home a free fossil. All free with admission to Cosley Zoo. We will be open from 10-4.
Date(s) of Event: Saturday October 19, 2019
Time: 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Location: Cosley Zoo 1356 N. Gary Ave Wheaton, IL
Contact Information: Bruce and Rene Lauer Lauer Foundation for Paleontology, Science and Education 630.408.9304,Tami Romejko Education & Guest Experience Manager Cosley Zoo 630.665.5534
Website: Lauerfoundationpse.org, Cosleyzoo.org
As part of the run up to ESCONI's 70th Anniversary, here is Flashback Friday post #15. If you have pictures or stories to contribute, please send them over to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks!
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Here are some pictures from the ESCONI 40th Anniversary Party.
Pictured are Kathy Dedina, President, Chet Williamson, Doris Kemp, Betty Williamson, Mary Cornwell, Earl Cornwell, Herb Beck, Charter Member.
Cake and Refreshments with Rosemarie Havlik
Stan Berger & Herb Beck display Fossils named for ESCONI
Reconstruction of the Xinhang forest landscape. Image credit: Wang et al, doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.053
SciNews has a post about a Devonian aged fossil forest discovered in China. The fossilized forest dates to 360 million years ago and was found near Xinhang in China's Anhui province. It is the oldest known fossil forest in Asia. A paper describing the fossils appeared in the journal Current Biology.
The Xinhang forest covered an area of at least 62 acres (250,000 m2) and grew in a coastal environment prone to flooding.
Lycopsid trees found in the forest resembled palm trees, with branchless trunks and leafy crowns.
Named Guangdedendron, they had no flowers and no seeds, but shed megaspores.
These trees were normally less than 10.5 feet (3.2 m) tall, but the tallest was estimated at 25.3 feet (7.7 m), taller than the average giraffe.
The ESCONI field trips to Braceville for Mazon Creek fossils are set for Sept 14 and 15, 2019 from 8 AM to 2 PM. You can attend either or both days. There is an attendance limit of 50 people each day.
Meet at 8 AM at the entrance to the collecting site on S Berta Road, just east of the intersection with Division St (Braceville IL). A nearby landmark for driving directions is the Braceville Gardner Cemetery, 7295 East Braceville Road, Braceville, IL. I can send a small map to anyone that needs it.
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‘All the World is Here’ is a new beer available beginning Monday at the Field Museum, inspired by the historical World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. Chicago Brewseum
The Chicago Sun Times has a story about the Field Museum's new beer. Produced in a collaboration with Chicago Brewseum and Temperance Beer, "All the World is Here" is a new beer that is inspired by the World's Columbian Exposition. The Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago in 1893. The Field Museum was founded on much of the exposition's displays.
Can you capture Chicago’s historical legacy in a beer?
For the Field Museum, the answer is yes.
Beginning Monday, museum-goers at the Field will be able to drink All the World is Here at the museum’s restaurants and bars, a new beer commemorating the city’s 1893 World’s Fair.
The beer was created in collaboration with the Chicago Brewseum and Evanston-based Temperance Beer Co.
This was Temperance Beer’s first time working with the Field. The Brewseum has an exhibition on display at the Field through early 2020.
The Field Museum was founded in 1893, the same year as the World’s Fair — and this beer intends to reflect that history.
“[This beer] was based off of a barley and corn from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition that is in our Economic Botany collection,” said Megan Williams, business manager at the Field Museum.
Emily Kwasny, operations manager at Temperance, said creative work on the beer began in December.
“We wanted to explore historical styles of beer that would have been brewed back then, and would have been familiar to people where they drink it,” Kwasny said.
In order to design the beer, Kwasny and the team at Temperance dug into the Field Museum’s physical archives. Kwasny learned chevalier — a barley malt — was popular in beers back in 1893 and now, it’s an ingredient in All the World is Here.
Three- D image of a brachiopod, captured using structured light scanning. Shell is about 2.5 cm high.
Roy Plotnick has a new blog post over on Medium. In this post, he discusses modern paleontology. Here's a hint... it's not your grandfather's paleontology. The tools and the analysis has changed much over time and technology is more and more important in understanding the history of life.
Paleontology, like most other fields of science, has been transformed by the advent of the high-speed computer, large databases, and sophisticated analytical equipment. Instead of being “old and archaic,” as it was derisively described to my colleague Jackie Wittmer Malinowski, paleontology is a modern science, eager to adopt the latest technology. In some cases, it has even been ahead of the curve. A 1969 paper by David Raup and Dolf Seilacher, on a computer model of animal movement, has been identified as one of the first examples of research into artificial life.
As part of the run up to ESCONI's 70th Anniversary, here is Flashback Friday post #14. If you have pictures or stories to contribute, please send them over to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks!
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Jim Konecny wrote this piece for the June 1994 edition of the ESCONI Earth Science News. This year marked the 55th anniversary of George's death. He was a very interesting man. His contributions were many to both ESCONI and society in general. To learn more, visit the George's Basement website. That site has a wealth of information about George, his family, and many, many other things.
GEORGE LANGFORD
1876-1964
June 16, 1994 marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Death of George Langford. The name George Langford is synonymous with the Mazon Creek Area. Not since Leo Lesquereux's published monograph in 1870 on Pennsylvanian flora had there been such a complete study of Pennsylvanian coal flora in the United States.
Who was this man George Langford? He was a paleontologist, archaeologist, author, artist, engineer, inventor, and athlete.
He was born on May 26, 1876 in Denver, Colorado. His family starting with his grandfather, had long been engaged in iron founding. Therefore, it was quite natural for him to enter into the same business. He graduated from Yale University in 1897 with an engineering degree. His athletic prowess surfaced at this time. He was a member of the rowing team, having been stroke on the crew for three years. In 1895, the crew went to the Henley Regatta in England.
In 1900 he moved to Joliet, Illinois where he was employed as an engineer and draftsman by the McKenna Processing Company - later becoming president of the company. It was at this time that he sustained a serious injury at the factory. While inspecting a piece of machinery his left arm was caught in some gears and literally pulled out of the socket at the shoulder. While with the McKenna Company, he was the originator of many inventions and secured numerous patents in the company name.
He was a dedicated family man amusing his children, George, Jr. and Lyda, with stories about prehistoric life. Later these stories were written down and published as 4 seperate books. He also Sculpted bas reliefs of prehistoric animals for them.
In the early 1900's, he became engaged in an extremely valuable archaeological excavation - this being the famous ‘Fisher Mounds' site. He located the mounds and salvaged all of the artifacts and preserved this important village site from destruction by a gravel company. His reports were published in the American Anthropologist (1927) and in the Transactions of the Illinois Academy of Science. The artifacts were deposited with the University of Chicago.
It was however his work at the strip mines that he was best noted for. Although his first trip to these mines in 1937 was a disappointing one it sparked an interest that kept him coming back over and over. Accompanied by his son George, Jr. he spent countless hours collecting, sorting, and identifying his finds. He estimated that he had collected at least 250,000 concretion specimans. In order to expose the fossils, these concretions, or nodules, must be placed on a hard surface and struck with a hammer to split them open. In order for George to crack these nodules, it was necessary, for him, to hold them with his feet. Facetiously he would remark "Occasionally the collector misses his aim and hits his thumb —- a painful injury results. When I miss my aim my shoes protect my feet. I have split many thousands of nodules and I have never hit my thumb".
Because of a dispute with the federal government over the use of some of the McKenna patents, George closed the company in 1945 and left Joliet. He moved into an apartment near Lincoln Park in Chicago. His massive collection was divided into twelve smaller ones that were donated to small colleges, a major one that was placed in the Illinois State Museum and the bulk was placed in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. For the first time in his life he was without an occupation and without his collection. This did not deter this determined and energetic man. He secured permission from the Field Museum to come and curate his former collection.
In 1947, he started on a second career as Curator of Plant Fossils at the museum. Imagine this at age 71 when most men are retired. He continued collecting plant fossils not only in the strip mines but also on trips for the museum in Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi. He discontinued his field work in 1959 and retired from the museum in 1962. Two of his monographs on the Mazon Creek Flora & Fauna have been published by Esconi Associates.
The last time I visited George was June 19, 1963 (the above photo was taken on that date by my wife Sylvia). He was working on his third monograph. His desire and energy remained with him to the end. He died on June 16, 1964 at the age of 88.
Jim Konecny
'Prehistoric Road Trip' host Emily Graslie, just outside Hanna, WY. Photo credit: Julie Florio and WTTW
WTTW has a post which announces a new 3-part natural history series entitled "Prehistoric Road Trip". The show is hosted by Emily Graslie, Chief Curiosity Correspondent at the Field Museum in Chicago. Emily is the host and creator of the popular YouTube series "The Brain Scoop". The show will premier on PBS stations nationwide in the summer of 2020. Wow, can't wait!
Filming is taking place this summer, as Graslie and a WTTW crew road trip around Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, where Graslie grew up. They're exploring 2.5 billion years of Earth's history through paleontology and fossil-hunting, from North American dinosaurs to ancient fishes, mammoths, and early mammals. Each of the three episodes will examine different eras in time, focusing on geology, ecology, and the environment, to understand what the United States looked like millions and even billions of years ago.
Beyond the three broadcast episodes, WTTW will provide extra opportunities for audiences to dive into Prehistoric Road Trip via a companion website featuring original digital content, behind-the-scenes travel journals, an interactive road trip map, and more.
It has taken billions of years for the Earth and the species on it to get to where they are today—waiting a year for Prehistoric Road Trip, until summer 2020, is nothing!
Here is a preview of the show, which is an episode of "The Brian Scoop".
Carlton University in Ottawa, CA has a press release about the PhD student that has been involved in recently describing two new Mazon Creek vertebrates. Earlier this year, Diabloroter bolti (paper) and Infernovenator steenae (paper) were published. The research has been conducted by Arjan Mann, Jason D Pardo, and Hillary C Maddin of the Department of Earth Sciences at Carlton. This press release describes some of Arjan's work. It's interesting that this research was done by reexamining specimens that were collected many years ago and then donated somewhat recently to the Field Museum in Chicago. The two papers are just the first two of many, with a bunch of others still in progress. ESCONI member David Duck provided life-like models for the research.
Hell hunter and devil digger. When Arjan Mann names a species, he doesn’t mess around.
As part of his PhD research into carboniferous period creatures, the Carleton Earth Sciencesstudent identified two new species. The two species date from about 310 million years ago, when the ancestors of modern reptiles, birds and mammals were moving permanently on to land.
The first he named Diabloroter — devil digger. Mann studied the specimen at the Field Museum in Chicago, where it had been preserved in a devilishly red latex peel. Its hard skull is similar in structure to modern animals that burrow, digging into the earth by compacting soil with their heads.
The second of the two creatures was an elongated, short-limbed animal that would have moved by sidewinding — much like a modern snake. He called it Infernovenator (hell hunter) to stick with the hellish theme.
Known as recumbirostrans — or colloquially as microsaurs — the two creatures were preserved in the Francis Creek Shale at Mazon Creek, Illinois. The site is about a 90-minute drive south of Chicago and has been attracting palaeontologists and collectors since the early 1900s. A boom in private collecting that began in the 1960s depleted it of its most obvious specimens and palaeontologists moved along to more productive locations.
As part of the run up to ESCONI's 70th Anniversary, here is Flashback Friday post #13. If you have pictures or stories to contribute, please send them over to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks!
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Jim O'Brien wrote these words about Dave and Sheila Bergmann in the March, 1998 edition of the newsletter. At that time, Jim was chairman of the Junior Study Group and Dave was Field Trip Chairman, a post he held from 1992-1998. Sheila served in a few capacities, including the Lapidary Study Group Chairwoman for many years. In March 1998, she was Corresponding Secretary.
Here's a fun photo. Sheila is in the front of the photo on the left and Dave is in the back of the one on the right.
Can you guess what prominent rock couple first met in a quarry?
Hint: Dave does the talking part.
As you may have guessed, Dave and Sheila Bergmann met in the Kona dolomite quarry. I'm writing this as a way of thanking them for all the work they do for the Club. It takes a lot of time to organize our wonderful field trips; and what great trips we've had, like the one to South Dakota and Canada. Even those of us who can't go benefit from the discussions, pictures and specimens brought back.
Sheila grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. She's very good with details. Garnet, her birthstone, is her favorite stone to collect. She especially likes the unusual colored ones. Sheila fondly remembers finding lots of garnets on the South Dakota trip.
Dave's favorite things are fossils, crinoids are his specialty. Some of his favorite trips have been St. Paul Quarry, Crawfordsville, Indiana, and Sylvania, Ohio. Dave also likes trilobites, so much so that on one trip he took a swan dive off a ledge and ended up on an emergency room with a skull fracture and broken wrist. This didn't stop him though, he returned to collecting and managed to find a 4 inch Isotelus!
On behalf of the Club I'd like to thank Sheila and Dave for all the knowledge, enthusiasm, and hard work they contribute to the Club.
Jim O'Brien
CNN Travel has a story about a teacher that finds a diamond at the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, Arkansas. There's a short video that does a great job telling the story.
Josh Lanik, 36, was vacationing with his family when he discovered a brandy-colored gem at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, Arkansas."It was blatantly obvious there was something different about it," Lanik said, according to a press release from the park issued Monday. "I saw the shine, and when I picked it up and rolled it in my hand, I noticed there weren't any sharp edges."The teacher from Hebron, Nebraska, showed the stone to his wife and then put the treasure in a bag where he collected other finds. The family spent two hours looking through the park's 37.5-acre diamond search area on July 24. Before leaving, they stopped by the Diamond Discovery Center in the park to see what kind of treasure they'd unearthed.Unbeknownst to Lanik, he was carrying around the largest diamond found in the park so far this year. It weighed in at 2.12-carat.More than 75,000 diamonds have been unearthed at the park since the first ones were discovered in 1906. So far this year, 296 diamonds have been registered at the park, weighing a total of 53.94 carats.
A whole skeleton of Palaeocarcharias stromeri from the Jura Museum Eichstätt. Image credit: Jürgen Kriwet.
SciNews has an article about the ancestor of Mackerel sharks. The article is from earlier this month, but posting it seems appropriate with Shark Week occurring this week. An ancestor of the Great White Shark (Carcharodon carcharias) has been found. Palearocarcharias stromeri was a small benthic shark, which lived about 165 million years ago, during the Jurassic period. The researchers looked at tooth structure to determine ancestry in sharks. The findings were published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.
“Similar to humans, shark teeth are composed of two mineralized structures: a hard shell of hypermineralized tissue (in humans enamel, in sharks enameloid) and a dentin core,” said Dr. Patrick Jambura from the University of Vienna and colleagues.
“Depending on the structure of the dentin we distinguish between two different types: orthodentin and osteodentin.”
“Orthodentin has a very compact appearance and is similar to the dentin we can find in human teeth.”
“In shark teeth, orthodentin is confined to the tooth crown. In contrast, the other dentin type is spongious in appearance and resembles real bone and therefore is called osteodentin.”
“It can be found in the root, anchoring the tooth to the jaw and in some species also in the tooth crown where it supports the orthodentin.”
Using high resolution micro-CT images, the scientists examined the tooth composition of the great white shark and its relatives.
They found a peculiar condition of the teeth of members of this group: the osteodentin of the roots intrudes into the crown and replaces the orthodentin there completely, making it the only type of dentin being present. This condition is not known from any other shark, which all possess orthodentin to some degree and thus it is confined to members of this group.
The excavated Dueling Dinosaurs. Photograph: Samuel Farar
The Guardian has an article about the so called "Dueling Dinosaurs". The "Dueling Dinosaurs" are a large fossil plate that consists of both a 28 foot long ceratoptian (probably Triceratops horridus) and a 22 foot long theropod (possibly Tyrannosaurus rex or the controversial Nanotyrannus lancensis). Both skeletons are fairly complete, with exceptional preservation, fully articulated, with envelops of mummified skin, and probably internal organs. These are among the best dinosaur fossils ever found. The article goes on to describe the discovery and the long court battle to decide who owns them.
he early June morning in Montana was already very hot and dry by 7.30, when Clayton Phipps and his friend, Mark Eatman, set out to search for fossils. Phipps, a rancher who calls himself the Dino Cowboy, was wearing his trademark black felt Stetson cattleman hat.
The two had gone bone collecting before, but they were joined on this day for the first time by Phipps’s cousin, Chad O’Connor. The trio fanned out to hike through the badlands of what they thought was the Judith River Formation; later, they would learn they had actually been in an area called Hell Creek, a division of gray and ochre sandstone, shale and clay deposited about 66m years ago during the Late Cretaceous, when the area was a swampy floodplain.
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Phipps and O’Connor returned to the site about a month later, this time with Lige and Mary Ann Murray, ranchers who owned the land where the bones had been found. In the US, fossils found on private land belong to the landowner; prospectors simply need their permission to dig. The Murrays signed off, and Phipps and O’Connor got to work. They built a road to the site. They began excavating the ceratopsian with penknives and brushes. Business partners were brought in; secret contracts were arranged. Eatman came to help when he could, along with a rotating cast of confidants.
After two weeks, the body of the plant-eater had been revealed. It was more than a pelvis and femur – it looked like a fairly complete skeleton of Triceratops horridus, which is the triceratops you’re thinking of. One day, Phipps was behind the wheel of his uncle’s backhoe, scooping out soil from around the fossil so it could be removed. Carefully watching each dump of the bucket, at one point he noticed dark fragments among the light-colored sandstone.
Bone chips.
Oh no, he thought. He jumped down, combed through the sand, found the claw of a theropod. Theropods, like Tyrannosaurus rex, are three-toed carnivores. That doesn’t match the plant-eater, Phipps thought. What is happening here?
Hesperornithoides miessleri. Image credit: Gabriel Ugueto
SciNews has an article about the discovery of a new bird-like dinosaur in Wyoming. The animal, Hesperornithoides miessleri, lived about 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period. It has been nicknamed Lori and was about the size of a chicken. Its contemporaries were giant dinosaurs like Stegaoaurus, Diplodocus, and Allosaurus. The description appeared in a paper in the Journal PeerJ.
Hesperornithoides miessleri is a highly terrestrial proto-bird, suggesting that many features scientists associate with being bird-like evolved in dinosaurs that lived out their lives on the ground.
“We found that Lori is a primitive member of a group of dinosaurs that includes Troodon, but perhaps more importantly we discovered that the smaller details of the family tree of bird-like dinosaurs isn’t quite as resolved as some researchers would claim,” said team leader Scott Hartman, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“For example, it only takes a few changes in the dataset for Hesperornithoides miessleri to be found as a closer relative of Velociraptor than of Troodon.”
“One robust finding we did come up with is that even as the interrelationships changed, the primitive members of all these groups were non-flying ground dwelling dinosaurs.”
“That means that some small relatives of Velociraptor such as Microraptor that looks like it could have glided evolved this separately from the modern bird family.”
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