Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

Curry's Public Auction Lapidary, Saturday, September 6th, 2014

Curry's Public Auction Lapidary, Saturday, September 6th, 2014 at 9 am.

 

Address:

Boone County Fairgrounds

8791 Rte 76

Belvidere IL

 

Questions:

Gary at 815-871-9212. 

 

Tips:

Cash or check only; bring flashlight; bring chair, arrive early)

 

To be auctioned: rough rock, fossils, crystals and minerals, machines (Star Diamond 10" Flat Lap, 2 Bunson Burners, casting wax, dremels, polishers, engravers, Foredom, grinder, etc...), miscellaneous (25 and 60 drawer cabinets, display boxes, drift wood, bottles, etc... ) and special items (sterling silver jewelry, black coral, amber, tilobite, coral colony, etc...). 

 

 

New Cretaceous Dino Track Site in Moab

From the ESCONI mailing list on Yahoo:

CNN video on a new Cretaceous dino track site in Moab, UT. Check it out through the link below.

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2014/08/22/dnt-fossils-unknown-species-discovered.cbc&hpt=hp_t4&from_homepage=yes&video_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F#/video/us/2014/08/20/dnt-dinosaur-tracks-125-million-years-old-utah.ksl

Very Cool!

 

Falls of the Ohio State Park’s Digging the Past is Saturday September 13, 2014

The Falls of the Ohio State Park’s Digging the Past is Saturday September 13, 2014 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. It combines Archaeology Day and Earth Discovery Day into a single event that promotes interests in archaeology and earth science. Activities for visitors of all ages are located around the parking lot behind the Interpretive Center.

You will enjoy learning about human history and the Earth’s past with nearly 20 different activities.

·         Archaeology – throw a dart with an atlatl and use primitive tools, make clay pottery, get dirty finding “artifacts” in a mock dig, play games, and more.

·         Geology – Dig for fossils and minerals in our refreshed collecting piles*, explore the fossil beds, examine micro-fossils with a microscope, make an egg carton geology collection, children’s craft area to make gem trees, weather rocks, are some of the highlights.

·         What do I have? Get your unknown artifacts and rocks identified by experts.

*Collecting is prohibited at the Falls of the Ohio; however, local quarries donate 30 tons of fossil-bearing Silurian Waldron shale and Devonian limestone residuum. Dig for brachiopods, bryozoans, corals, crinoids, cystoids, snails, clams, and trilobites in our collecting piles. Search the mineral pile from Rosiclare, Illinois for fluorite, sphalerite, barite and calcite. We can direct your club to other localities in the area to collect fossils. This would be an ideal weekend field trip. We hope members of your group will be able to attend! 

Visit www.fallsoftheohio.org or www.facebook.com/fallsoftheohio for more information.

 

 

T-rex Trying to do the ALS ICE Bucket Challenge

 

 

There are a bunch more on that tumblr blog.   Enjoy!

Source: http://trextrying.tumblr.com/post/95434537359/t-rex-trying-the-als-ice-bucket-challenge

Honey, I shrunk the Theropods...

Interesting story by Darren Naish over at Scientific American. He unveils details of his paper in a recent issue of Science (August 1st, 2014).  As, he states theropod dinosaurs (the "meat eaters") were shrinking in size and becoming more and more "birdy" as time passed. What about Tyrannosaurus rex, you say? T-rex (and his/her large friends) were the exception rather than the rule.

 

Some time round about 165 million years ago, the group of small, feathered dinosaurs that we call birds evolved from within the theropod radiation (theropods are the so-called ‘predatory dinosaurs’: the great group that includes animals like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor as well as the birds). As anyone reasonably familiar with recent palaeontological discoveries will know, we’re now aware of a large number of fossils that blur and smudge whatever distinction there might have been between ‘dinosaur’ and ‘bird’. Archaeopteryx may or may not be one of the oldest members of the bird lineage, but it’s evident that – when it was alive – it belonged to just one of several lineages of small, long-legged, fully feathered, omnivorous or predatory theropods, all of which possessed a mosaic of ‘bird-like’ and ‘unbird-like’ characters.

Indeed, if we look at theropod history across the whole of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, we see a gradual, cumulative acquisition of bird-like features, ranging from wishbones and a pneumatised skeleton to complex feathers, a reduced, three-fingered hand, an enlarged sternum (breastbone) and tiny size.

This trend of increasing birdiness is well known and has often been commented on. Allosaurus is more bird-like than Coelophysis,Tyrannosaurus is more bird-like than Allosaurus, Ornithomimus is more bird-like than Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor is more bird-like than Ornithomimus, and Archaeopteryx is more bird-like than Velociraptor. Incidentally, while this general trend might imply that theropods are a ‘bird factory’ (Holtz 2000) and not much else, remember that evolution is about divergence and diversification, with the umpteen lineages that split off along the way all having complex, intricate and independent histories of their own.

 

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2014/07/31/50-million-years-of-shrinking-theropod-dinosaurs/?WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter

 

 

ESCONI Events September, 2014

 

	September 2014
Fri 9/12	ESCONI General Meeting 8:00 p.m. College of Dupage,  - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) "What Can Teeny-Tiny Fossils Teach Us About a Big, Bad Ice Sheet. A Micropaleontologist in Antarctica." Reed Scherer, PhD, Instructor of Micropaleontology and Biostratigraphy, Northern Illinois University
Sat 9/13	ESCONI Mineralogy Meeting 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed Building (TEC), Room 1038B (Map) Show & Tell Mineral Video
Sat 8/13	Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art, Mazon Creek Collecting Field Trip, 9 am to 3pm, reservations required (630) 833-1616, $40 per person
Sat 9/20	ESCONI Paleontology Meeting, 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed Building (TEC), Room 1038B (Map) Show and Tell: Bring Your Favorite or New Fossils
Sat 9/27	Mazon Creek Field Trip, Braceville, IL, see trip info
	ESCONI Archaeology Meeting, Cancelled.
Sat 9/27	Lizzadro Mueum of Lapidary Art, Celebrate Smithsonian Museum Day,
Sun 9/28	Mazon Creek Field Trip, Braceville, IL, see trip info
Sun 9/28	Lizzadro Museum of Lapirdary Art, Elmhurst, IL , Jeffrey Post Presents the Smithsonian Gem Collection, Learn about the legends and lore behind famous gems and teh variety mineral species represented. Sunday Lecture, 2 pm, $15/person non member; 10$ member, Reservations recommended

Palaeontology... Know the Signs!

 

Get help before it's too late!

 

Tenth-Annual Geode Fest in Hamilton, Illinois - Sept. 26th, 27th, and 28th, 2014

 

The 10th Annual Geode Fest in Hamilton, Illinois is the weekend of September 26th-28th, 2014.   There is a $20.00 registration fee (single person) or $30.00 family fee entitles you to 2 – hunts per day on Friday and Saturday, and 1 – hunt on Sunday morning. Some of these guided hunts are on private property, not normally open to the general public for geode hunting at any other time.

More information can be found at the following link.  Geode Fest  Get out there... "It's a fun place to rock!"

 

 

Coming to a theater near you... Dinosaur 13!

Dinosaur 13 is a movie about Sue the T-rex at the Field Museum.  You can see her there in all her glory in the main gallery.  

The film gets it's name from the fact that Sue was the 13th T-rex ever discovered.  She is the oldest, most complete, and largest T-rex to date.  The movie has gotten pretty good reviews.  This one is from the LA Times.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-dinosaur-13-review-20140815-column.html

"The fate of some very old bones may not sound like compelling cinema, but when they compose the 65-million-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex that was 41 feet long and 18 feet high back in the day, all bets are off.

Director Todd Miller talks about his Sundance film, "Dinosaur 13."

"Dinosaur 13," the story of a controversial T. rex named Sue and the havoc her ancient bones wreaked on numerous lives, turns out to be an altogether splendid documentary. It's not only a rich, poignant human story of intense joy followed by unending heartache but also has more complex ramifications dealing with issues such as governmental overreach and the long-standing, often bitter rift between academic and commercial fossil collectors."

 

Here is a link to the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZywsT8Sy-c

Enjoy!