Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

Field Trip Cancelled August 7, 2010

The Winfield Mounds Forest Preserve trip has been canceled due to low participation. However, the Forest Preserve of DuPage County is offering the same trip free of charge to the public on Saturday, Sept. 25th from 10 a.m. to 12:00 Noon for ages 10 and up; under 18 with an adult. Registration begins Sept. 11 by calling 630-942-6200.

The Forest Preserve District is also offering "The Prehistoric Elephants of DuPage County" on Saturday, August 28th from 1 until 3 at Willowbrook Wildlife Haven where participants will learn "about the amazing discoveries of mammoths and mastodons found in DuPage County. Ages 8 and up with an adult. $3 per person; $5 per family. Registration begins Aug.14. Call 630-942-6200.

Field Trip! Sat. Aug. 7 Winfield Mounds, 2010

Winfield Mounds Forest Preserve, located at Winfield and Geneva Roads in Windfield, was named for burial mounds of pre-historic Native Americans who lived along the West Branch of the DuPage River. the 359 acre preserve contains three dome-shaped mounds set in triangular pattern constructed 1,000 years ago. These are the only documented Native American burial grounds found in DuPage County.

Join Forest Preserve District of DuPage County (FPDDC) Naturalist, Jack MacRae on a hike to the mounds and hear the compelling story of the people who built the mounds and lived in the associated village.

This field trip excursion, which is limited to 25 individuals, is scheduled for Saturday, August 7, 2010 between 10:30 a.m. and 12:00 noon. Cost for the hike is $3.00 for adult members and $1.00 for junior members. Please send your checks in advance to Joseph Kubal, ESCONI Event Planner, 30W600 Sunrise Road, Naperville, IL 60563.

The hike is on a crushed limestone path and the walking distrance is about one mile round trip. In the event of inclement weather, the hike will be rescheduled to Saturday, August 14, 2010 between 10:30 am and 12:00 noon. There are no parking lots or restrooms at the preserve. People should park on the west should of Winfield Road, immediately south of Geneva Road. The shoulder is wide enough for about 20 vehicles. Mr. MacRae will meet the group there.

If you need additional information, please contact Joe at 630-983-6159 or e-mail to [email protected].

Translating the Stories of Life Forms Etched in Stone

PUZZLE Many of the creatures found in the fossil record from the time immediately preceding the Cambrian are so unlike modern forms that deciphering what they are and how they lived continues to challenge paleontologists.

In 1909, Charles Walcott, a paleontologist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, discovered one of the greatest and most famous fossil troves high in the Canadian Rockies on Burgess Pass in British Columbia. The slabs of Burgess Shale that Walcott excavated contained the earliest known examples at the time of many major animal groups in the fossil record, in rocks that were about 505 million years old.

Walcott’s discovery was further evidence of the so-called Cambrian Explosion — the apparently abrupt appearance of complex animals in the fossil record within the Cambrian Period, from about 542 to 490 million years ago. Although not seen before on the scale documented in the Burgess Shale, the emergence of trilobites and other animals in the Cambrian was familiar to paleontologists, and had troubled Charles Darwin a great deal.

The difficulty posed by the Cambrian Explosion was that in Darwin’s day (and for many years after), no fossils were known in the enormous, older rock formations below those of the Cambrian. This was an extremely unsettling fact for his theory of evolution because complex animals should have been preceded in the fossil record by simpler forms.

In “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin posited that “during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures.” But he admitted candidly, “To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer.”

It took a very long time, and the searching of some of the most remote places on the planet — in the Australian Outback, the Namibian desert, the shores of Newfoundland and far northern Russia — but we now have fossil records from the time immediately preceding the Cambrian. The rocks reveal a world whose oceans were teeming with a variety of life forms, including primitive animals, which is certainly good news for Darwin.

Now, this once-worrisome gap in the fossil record is a period of intense interest to geologists as well as paleontologists. The former have even given it its own division in the geological timescale. The Ediacaran Period, from 635 to 542 million years ago, is the first new geological period to be named in more than a century. Moreover, geologists have developed some intriguing theories about how dramatic changes in the Earth’s climate and chemistry during the Ediacaran may have allowed for the evolution of animals.

The first major advance towards finding the earliest animal life occurred in 1946 when Reginald Sprigg, a geologist for the South Australia government, was checking out some old mines in the Ediacaran Hills of the Flinders Range several hundred miles north of Adelaide.

Sprigg noticed some striking disc-shaped impressions up to four inches in diameter on the exposed surfaces of rocks nearby. Sprigg interpreted the patterns as the fossil remains of soft-bodied creatures like jellyfish or their relatives. But when Sprigg first showed the imprints to leading authorities, they dismissed them as artifacts made by the weathering of the rocks. However, later that year, when Sprigg found the frond-like forms he called Dickinsonia , he was certain that such geometrical impressions could have been made only by living creatures.

Sprigg was excited by both the unusual appearance of the fossils and by their age, which he believed to be the beginning of the Cambrian, and made them the oldest animal forms yet seen. But despite their potential importance, Sprigg’s discoveries were ignored at an international geology meeting and his paper describing the fossils was rejected by the leading journal, . Sprigg moved on to other, more rewarding pursuits in the oil, gas, and mining industries.

Scientific attention to these strange forms was not revived until a decade later when more soft-bodied forms were found in the Ediacaran Hills and in England, and their age was firmly established as actually predating the Cambrian. Deposits of similar aged forms have been discovered at Mistaken Point on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, in southern Namibia, the White Sea of Russia, and more than 30 other locations on five continents. The global distribution of these disc-, frond-, tube-, branch-, or spindle-shaped forms demonstrate that life was complex and diverse in the Ediacaran.

But finding these fossils has posed many new mysteries. Many of the creatures are so unlike modern forms that deciphering what they are and how they lived continues to challenge paleontologists. Prof. Andrew Knoll of Harvard University has likened the Ediacaran forms to a paleontological “Rorschach” test because different scientists often interpret the same fossil very differently.

Dickinsonia, for example, has been interpreted as being a relative of jellyfish, a marine worm, a lichen, or even as a member of a completely extinct kingdom. The challenge to classifying most Ediacarans is that they lack some features that are characteristic of modern animals, a mouth or an anus in the case of Dickinsonia, or the shells and hard parts typical of many Cambrian groups. But, in fact, such simple bodies are exactly what should be expected of primitive forerunners of later animals.

On the other hand, scientists have had to explain how such creatures functioned. Some of the very flat-bodied Ediacarans, for instance, lived on sediments and appear to have fed by directly absorbing nutrients by osmosis.

The kinds of animals that paleontologists have been especially eager to identify in the Ediacaran are those with bilateral body symmetry, the feature characteristic of the majority of modern animal groups, including ourselves.

Bilateral animals flourished in the Cambrian so tracing their origins is crucial to understanding the pace of animal evolution. Several bilateral Ediacaran animals have been discovered, including Kimberella, a possible mollusc. Hundreds of Kimberella specimens are known that date to about 555 million years ago, 50 million years before the animals of the Burgess Shale.

The Ediacaran fossil record thus stretches the origins of animals to well before the Cambrian Explosion. But it also raises the question of why, after more than 2.5 billion years during which microscopic life dominated the planet, larger, more complex, forms emerged at that time?

A key requirement for larger creatures is oxygen, and the dramatic history of oxygen levels is also etched in Ediacaran rocks. Geologists now understand that the earliest Ediacaran organisms were deep water creatures that emerged 575 to 565 million years ago, shortly after a major ice age ended about 580 million years ago.

Recent chemical analyses of Ediacaran sediments reveal that the deep ocean lacked oxygen before and during that ice age, then became much richer in oxygen and stayed that way after the glaciers melted . That sharp rise in oxygen may have been the catalyst to the evolution of animals, including our ancestors.

Several weeks after the publication of “On the Origin of Species” and amid a torrent of criticism, Darwin added a mischievous postscript to a letter to his friend, the geologist Charles Lyell: “Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.” The Ediacaran fossils tell us that Darwin was being too generous. Our earliest animal ancestor probably had no head, tail, or sexual organs, and lay immobile on the sea floor like a door mat.

from the New York Times, July 27, 2010

Do You Know About Paleovirology?

Not for creationists... but for everyone else, this is an awesome interview with a paleovirologist....

Interview on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC:

Geneticist Dr. Harmit Malik, Associate Member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle, and Assistant Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, explains his work in paleovirology. He was awarded the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, which is given to immigrants age 38 or younger. He also won the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering...

End of Last Ice Age

Via Science News:

Scientists still puzzle over how Earth emerged from its last ice age, an event that ushered in a warmer climate and the birth of human civilization. In the geological blink of an eye, ice sheets in the northern hemisphere began to collapse and warming spread quickly to the south. Most scientists say that the trigger, at least initially, was an orbital shift that caused more sunlight to fall across Earth's northern half. But how did the south catch up so fast?

In a review paper published this week in the journal Science, a team of researchers look to a global shift in winds for the answer...

Alaska Geologist Survives 2 Bear Attacks

Via Research & Development:

... The bear wandered away and Miller thought he was in the clear. Pulling himself to his knees, he found out how wrong he was..

2 Billion Year OId Multicellular Life

Via Science News:

The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago.

New Mastadon Find in Tennessee

Via geology.com:

...Contractors excavating for a new swimming pool near Memphis, Tennessee were surprised to find what seemed to be a giant tooth. The fossil turned out to be the first trilophodon discovered in the Mid-South...

Radio Interview with Paleontologist Kristi Curry Rogers

Via Minnesota Public Radio:

Paleontologist Kristi Curry Rogers talks about her work on a new species of long-necked dinosaur, and how the discovery of the animal's "brain case" in Madagascar is the key to its identity. She also discusses recent developments in the world of paleontology, including the unearthing of the world's largest bed of dinosaur fossils in western Canada, new evidence on dinosaur mating rituals, and what today's ostriches can teach us about how two-legged dinos moved through space.

Jurassic Tracksite

Via Geology.com:

...At the Moyeni tracksite in Lesotho, southern Africa, footprints of four-legged Jurassic dinosaurs cross an ancient point bar with an algal matted top, a gently inclined slope and a rippled riverbed surface...

Mojoceratops

Via Boston.com

... The Mojoceratops was hiding in plain sight for years. Longrich was studying a dinosaur called a Chasmosaurus from museum fossil specimens when he realized that he was looking at a mishmash of two species...

South Dakota Mining Alum Get Preview

Via Rapid City Journal:

... The new Paleontology Research Laboratory at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology opened its doors Friday for a sneak preview as part of the school's five-year reunion....

Supercave

Via Failure:

... Last week, I interviewed James M. Tabor, author of the best-selling new book “Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth” (Random House), to discuss the ongoing race to find the world’s deepest cave, the physical and mental challenges of extreme caving, and why the unendingly patient scientists at the forefront of this endeavor haven’t received the same level of attention and accolades as other boldly-going-where-no-one-has-gone-before adventurers...

Juniors Field Trip - Saturday 7/24

Junior Member's Field trip to Devil's Cave. Meet at Red Oak Nature Center in North Aurora Il. at 10:30 a.m. Juniors will be encouraged to see the sights at the museum, which include a "shrinking room", a bee colony, a hands-on area, and a room filled iwth live animals native to the area. 9 minute video about the preserve and the legend of Devil's cave, followed by a walk to and exploration of the cave. Afterwards, we will stop at a nearby A&W Root Beer restaurant for a bite to eat.  For further information, contact Joe Kubal, [email protected] or (630) 983-6159. No pre-registration is necessary - just need to be an ESCONI member. Adults are welcome. 

Geologists & Calif. State Rock

From NYT:

... Empirically speaking, geologists are not a particularly irascible group. But those who make their living studying rocks, minerals and gems in California — and increasingly those scientists beyond the state’s borders — are enraged over a bill in Sacramento that would knock serpentine, the official state rock, off its mantel...

Geology of Gulf Oil

Via Washington Post:

... the gulf has its own near-unique geology, shaped by the great river that flows into it. The Mighty Mississippi, the Father of Waters, drains almost everything from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Millions of years ago, the Red River, which forms part of the Texas/Oklahoma border, was as big as the Mississippi. These rivers dumped dead organisms into the gulf in prodigious quantities..

Geology of Gulf Oil

Via Washington Post:

... the gulf has its own near-unique geology, shaped by the great river that flows into it. The Mighty Mississippi, the Father of Waters, drains almost everything from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Millions of years ago, the Red River, which forms part of the Texas/Oklahoma border, was as big as the Mississippi. These rivers dumped dead organisms into the gulf in prodigious quantities..

Fossil Collecting Field Trip with Lizzadro Museum, 2010

Travel by motor coach to a quarry near Rockford, Illinois.  Collect Ordovician Period (450 million years old)) marine fossils in limestone.  Collectable fossils include:  brachiopods, gastropods, corals, crinoids, trilobites and cephalopods.
 
Field Trip - Ages 8 yrs. to Adult
8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Fee:  $40.00 per person
Museum Members $35.00
Reservations Required by Friday July 16th at 5:00 p.m.
(630) 833-1616

2 Dinosaurs Are Really The Same?

Via MSU

... MSU paleontologists John Scannella and Jack Horner said in the July 14 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, however, that Triceratops and Torosaurus are actually the same dinosaur at different stages of growth....

Geology Videos On Line

Via Arizona Geology:

There are scores of science channels on YouTube and a fair number of geology-themed ones. Here's a sampling of geo channels with a fair amount of high quality content. Do you have any others you'd like to recommend?