Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

ESCONI Events December 2013

Fri 12/6	ESCONI General Meeting, Board Meeting & Holiday Party 5:30 to 7:30 dinner, 8:00 p.m. lecture College of Dupage,  - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) Topic: The Discovery of a Marine Apex Predator from the Triassic by Jim Holstein,Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies, The Field Museum. Come learn about the discovery and research of Thalattoarchon saurophagis with Jim Holstein from the Field Museum.  He will discuss the 1998 Field Museum expedition to Nevada where this 'T-rex" of the sea was discovered as well as what scientists learned from this fossil.  ESCONI ANNUAL HOLIDAY PARTY      It is time to celebrate the holiday season with our annual ESCONI get together.                           FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6th, 2013                                          5:30 to 7:30 pm                                     Cozymel’s Restaurant                                         311 East Loop Road                                         Wheaton, IL 60187                                     [email protected]                                            (630) 871-1030 PLEASE NOTE: The Holiday party will be at a new restaurant: Cozymel's in Wheaton on Butterfield just east of Naperville Rd. For $15.99 per person, they will provide us a buffet with 3 entree choices (fajitas, enchiladas and tamales) along with chips and salsa, hot flour or corn tortillas, rice and refritos or black beans. Be prepared to pay with CASH! We will continue our tradition of a Secret Santa gift exchange. This grab bag is optional. If you do want to participate, please make sure that your gift is earth science related, has a value of $15.00 and is labeled “male” or “female” if it is a gender specific gift. If you would like to attend the Holiday Party, please RSVP by December 5th to Rob Sula (630) 236-9695 e-mail: [email protected].
Sat 12/14	ESCONI Mineralogy Meeting 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: Annual Holiday Rock Identification Contest
Sat 12/21	ESCONI Paleontology Meeting No meeting
Sat 12/28	Archaeology Study Group Meeting. No Meeting

Baby Dinosaur Found in Canada

From Yahoo News via a member on the ESCONI Facebook page

...The team was bone-hunting in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta when Currie came upon what looked like a turtle shell sticking out from a hillside. Upon closer inspection, the fossil turned out to be a frill, the bony decorative headgear that surrounds the back of the head in ceratopsids.

When the team excavated, they found the fossilized skeleton of a tiny dinosaur they identified as a Chasmosaurus belli, a species commonly found in the area.

Drowning victim

Amazingly, almost the entire skeleton was intact, although sometime in the past, a sinkhole had opened up below the beast and the forelimbs had fallen away into an abyss. The fossil was so well-preserved that the tiny, rosettelike pattern on its skin was imprinted in the rock below the dinosaur.

Hope to See You This Saturday - Work on Collections

Work Day at the warehouse at 9:00 am this Saturday, November 30 at the collections storage facility in Montgomery, IL. Activities will include identifying mineral and fossil samples.

If you can volunteer, please call John Good at 630-303-2352 for directions.

Note new phone number to call for directions .... 630-303-2352

3D Print Smithsonian Pieces

Via Read/Write: 

Today, 3D design software company Autodesk revealed an advance in technology that will let us get up close to our culture’s our rarest relics. With the Smithsonian X 3D Explorer, anyone with an Internet connection can examine, manipulate, and even print exact 3D models of a few of the Smithsonian’s most precious items. 

Paleontology Study Group This Saturday - 11/16

ESCONI Paleontology Meeting 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed Building (TEC), Room 1038B (Map) Silurian Cephalopods by John Catalani. A silent auction with fossils from the Dick Ade Collection will be held.

Earth Science Guide to Fossil Dating

Here is an article about fossil dating. It includes a long list of links to other resources too. 

Another Paleontology Cake

From imgur:

 

How Will Digital Impact Archaeology?

Via HASTAC: How will digital humanities impact archaeology and ancient history?

One major opportunity linking DH and archaeology is the ever-increasing access we have to archaeological landscapes. This new project in Wales is a great example,http://www.cofiadurcahcymru.org.uk/arch/archwilio_pages/english/app.html. You can use tablets or mobile devices to see the archaeology underfoot for thousands of sites across Wales. At UCLA, we also have multiple DH projects that allow us to reconstruct architecture within its landscape, allowing new ways to analyze and explore, for example digital Karnak (http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak/experience). I am interested to see how people use these different models to create new analytical approaches. I have a colleague, for example, who is using a digital model to record multi-sensory information throughout the model, using the three-dimensional environment to not only look at space, but also how that space and those materials would affect temperature, sound, and smell. At the same time, after having done some 3d-laser scanning myself, I see that there's a lot of exciting directions in this field, but simultaneously, I am concerned that without directed research problems, these models will use a lot of resources without answering many more questions.

Habitable Earth-sized Planets

From The Atlantic:

22 percent—essentially one in five—of sun-like stars have potentially habitable Earth-size planets. (Not all of those planets, however, may be rocky or feature liquid water, a presumed prerequisite for life. And it's worth noting, as well, that the margin of error for that stat is plus or minus 8 percent.) Caveats aside, however, that is still an astoundingly large number.

Fossil Friday

From letters from Gondowana:

Isabel Clifton Cookson was one of Australia’s first professional women scientists, but unlike Adele V. Vicent, who studied  the importance Silurian-Devonian floras in Victoria,  her scientific work is well recognized.  She was one of the most prominent palynologist of the twenty century. She described a total of 110 genera, 557 species and 32 sub especific taxa of palynomorphs and plants, and published 93 scientific papers (some of them in collaboration with other prominent scientists).

Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops Auction

A farmer is set to become an overnight millionaire after stumbling across the 70-million-year-old bones of two dinosaurs on his land.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2473280/Farmer-millionaire-2-DINOSAUR-skeletons-discovered-land.html#ixzz2jVB4Ltlv 

Looking for Board Members

Let us know of your interest and abilities!  We would like to include new people on the Board and welcome offers to participate.

So if you can participate and share your skills, email, talk or call a board member and let them know you are interested in running the club! (You can find our names and numbers in the newsletter on the first left-hand page.)

Events for November 2013

Fri 11/8	ESCONI General Meeting 8:00 p.m. College of Dupage,  - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) Topic: Jack MacRae, the Naturalist at Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn. "The Return of Large Predators to Illinois." The talk will include the 100% verified photos of various large predators that have been found in Illinois over the past 15 years. These include 3 black bears, 4-6 mountain lions and 12-14 wolves.
Sat 11/9	ESCONI Mineralogy Meeting 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: Granite Mountain by Jim Daly. A silent auction with minerals from the Dick Ade collection will be held.
Sat 11/16	ESCONI Paleontology Meeting 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed Building (TEC), Room 1038B (Map) Silurian Cephalopods by John Catalani. A silent auction with fossils from the Dick Ade Collection will be held.
Fri 11/22	ESCONI Board Meeting. 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, Tech Ed Build. TEC 1038B  (Map)
Sat 11/23	Archaeology Study Group Meeting. 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed Building (TEC), Room 1038B (Map) Topic:  Alexander the Great: The man, the legend and the history that he left behind. Take a trip back to 300 BC when Alexander ruled and uncover some of the rare known facts of this "boy" king. Learn about his family, his rule and the archaeological artifacts that were left behind. Scholars can spend a lifetime studying the artifacts and coinage minted during his life as well as those after death. The beauty of some of these coins are unmatched anywhere in history. See a few for yourself during this meeting in addition to those issued by his father and kings that ruled after he died. This meeting will explore why he was so important and what the future learned from him.

What's Geology To Do With Coffee?

From Four Degrees:

Definition of Andisol (USDA soil taxonomy) – ‘Andisols are soils formed in volcanic ash and defined as soils containing high proportions of glass and amorphous colloidal materials, including allophane, imogolite and ferrihydrite.’

Paleolithic hand prints mostly done by women

FromScience Daily - Via ESCONI Yahoo Discussion Group:

Plaster handprints from kindergarten, handprint turkeys, handprints outside Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood -- are all part of modern life, but ancient people also left their handprints on rocks and cave walls. Now, a Penn State anthropologist can determine the sex of some of the people who left their prints, and the majority of them were women.

Mosquitoes Fossilized with Blood Meal

Via The Verge:

according to new research, mosquitoes that feed on blood have been around for at least 46 million years. Researchers led from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History made the discovery by studying fossilized mosquitoes. Eventually, they came across one that appeared to still be filled with its final meal of blood — though that may not sound like a rare phenomenon, it is. The researchers write that such a finding has never been described before.