Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

ESCONI Events February 2015

Fri, Feb. 13	ESCONI General Meeting 8:00 p.m. College of Dupage,  - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) - Topic:“The Human Paradox: Friendship and Violence in Evolutionary Perspective.” by Dr. John Terrell, Anthropologist and Curator, Field Museum
Sat, Feb. 14	ESCONI Mineralogy Meeting 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: "Nevada", ESCONI member Jim Daly will speak about the Silver Coin Mine, Valmy, NV.  Others will discuss the Meikle Goldstrike Mine in Carlin Trend.
Fri, Feb. 20	ESCONI Archaeology Study Group Meeting. 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed Building (TEC), Room 1038B (Map) -Topic: "Asian Influence in Ancient Petroglyphs", Dr John Ruskamp will be presenting his latest findings in his ongoing research of ancient petroglyphs of the west and Asian influence. He will be presenting new findings that are not yet public.
Sat, Feb. 21	ESCONI Paleontology Meeting 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed Building (TEC), Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: "Cystoids", ESCONI member Tom Williams

CBC Quirks & Quarks Oldest Known Snake Fossils

Artist's conception of two of the ancient snakes. (Julius Csotonyi)

The January 31st, 2015 edition of Quirks & Quarks has a story on the oldest known snake fossils.  The four new fossil specimens were found in various places, two in England and one each in Portugal and Colorado (in the US).  Originally thought to be lizards, new research shows all four represent new species with ages ranging from 143 to 167 million years ago.  That pushes back the oldest snake by an astounding 70 million years!  The original paper from Nature Communications can be found here.

 

Fossil Friday: Find the Trilobite

Here's a little puzzle... find the trilobite.  It's a small enrolled Ditomopyge from the Permian of Kansas.

Etymology of Species Names

Many of us know that the greek and latin languages are the basis of many species names.  To decode them into their meaning, use these pages:

List of Greek and Latin roots and Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names

Some examples:

Triceratops, Tri (three), cera (horn), ops (eye, face), three horned face

Tyrannosaurus, Tyranno (absolute ruler, tyrant) saurus (lizard), tyrant lizard

Dimetrodon, Di (two), metro (measures), don (dont, tooth), two types of teeth

Try it yourself for "Dinosaur", "Pteradactyl", "Trilobite", and "Pecopteris".

 

 

CBC Quirks & Quarks On Potential Tool Usage By Australopithecus

Quirks & Quarks has a story in their January 24th, 2015 podcast on Australopithecus africanus and potential tool usage.  By studing the structure of hand bones, it has been determined that A. africanus had sufficient grip strength to use tools.  The study looked at the structure of the inner trabecular bone.

The earliest known use of stone tools is from 2.6 million years ago. They were made by a species of hominin known as Homo habilis. Making stone tools and using them is only possible with the capability to make a precision grip with an opposable thumb. Human hands have that capability, but not our great ape relatives.

Dr. Tracy Kivell - a Canadian scientist and Reader of Biological Anthropology at the University of Kent in England - has recently studied a fossil from the hand of Australopithecus africanus, a species that lived up to 3 million years ago and not associated with stone tool use.

The structure of the inner trabecular bone indicates that this hand was able to make such a grip, and could have made stone or other tools, one-half million years earlier than previously thought.

Original paper in Science

 

 

The 25 Biggest Turning Points in Earth's History

BBCearth has a cool page called The 25 Biggest Turning Points in Earth's History.   The list includes events like the formation of the Earth, the great oxidation event, the "Cambrian Explosion", and various mass extinction events like the "Great Dying" and extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.   It's well done and includes estimates on when the events happened.

There's a bunch of good content over at BBCearth.

 

CBS Sunday Morning has a story about Stonehenge

On CBS Sunday Morning today (January 25th, 2015), there is a story about the archaeological work which is working to discover the secrets of Stonehenge.  The story discusses newer techniques using underground imaging to reveal never before seen details of what Stonehendge was back when it was built.  These techniques have shown the positions of missing parts of the monument and long buried locations and features in the surrounding countryside.  The Smithonian Channel has a documentary that is the basis of this report.

And they're being looked at in a way that's never been possible before, using high definition, ground-penetrating radar and other magnetic- and resistance-sensitive survey equipment in what's being called the Hidden Landscapes Project.

A documentary team from the Smithsonian Channel has been following the archaeologists around; and -- using computer generated imagery -- it's been digitally reconstructing some of the monuments that have long since disappeared, like a burial chamber built of wooden posts, with timbered walls and covered with earth. It predates Stonehenge by centuries, and would have held the remains of around 50 bodies.

MAPS EXPO 2015 to be held April 10th - 12th, 2015

MAPS EXPO 2015 will be held April 10th - 12th, 2015 at Sharpless Auctions, in Iowa City, IA.  The topic is the Centozoic Era.  There will be a fossil dealers, a silent auction, and much, much more.  For more information, see the December MAPS newsletter.  The MAPS EXPO show is the world's largest fossil only show.

The Digest Editors are calling for papers to be included in the EXPO Edition of the Digest. The theme for EXPO XXXVII is the Cenozoic Era.  Papers dealing with Cenozoic fossils, localities, or
stratigraphy would be appreciated. The papers should be in Word, Times New Roman, size 12 Font, single spaced, with one inch margins and e-mailed to one of the Digest Editors by the 16th of February 2015.

John: [email protected]
Chris: [email protected]

 

The Lizzadro Museum has "Dinosaurs at the Museum" on Saturday, January 24th

Rob Sula will be speaking at the Lizzadro Museum this Saturday, January 24th, 2015.  His talk is titled "Form Follows Function: Interpreting Dinosaurs Through Their Anatomy".  With many years of field experience, Rob is a very interesting speaker!

Dinosaurs have captured our collective imagination since Sir Richard Owen first described them in 1842. Their great size alone makes them unique in the history of terrestrial vertebrates. But their bones raise many questions. What did they look like? Were they fast or slow? How did they feed? How did they defend themselves? Using actual fossils, field paleontologist, Rob Sula will interpret the lives and behaviors of Dinosaurs.

Lecture - Youth to Adult
60 minutes - 2:00 p.m.
Regular Museum Admission
Museum Members Free

Reservations Recommended: (630) 833-1616

Also see for more details

Rods and Cones Preserved in 300 Million Year Old Fish Eye

Fossilized rods and cones have been found in a 300 million year old fish, according to a paper published in the December 23rd, 2014 issue of Nature Communications.  The photoreceptors were discovered using a scanning electron microscope.  The fish, Acanthodes bridgei was found in the Hamilton Quarry in Kansas, which was a shallow lagoon in the Pennsylvannian.  Because there were both rods and cones suggests that fish have been seeing in color for 300 million years.  Gengo Tanaka of Kumamoto University in Japan, the lead author, said fossils from this quarry are very well preserved because they were buried very quickly in the sediments in the lagoon.

In the case of this fish, an extinct species called Acanthodes bridgei, the preservation process probably also got some help from bacterial activity that left a thin film of phosphate over the eyes before it was buried.

Tanaka said that gills and pigments on other parts of the fish were also preserved. However, he had not looked to see whether organs and nerves were intact as well.

The researchers compared the fossilized fish eye to the modern-day fish Rhinogobius, which is similar in size to A. bridgei and which also lives in slightly salty water. They found that the ratio of rods to cones was similar in both fish, which suggests A. bridgei was more active during the day and relied on its vision to make a living.

Tanaka said the discovery could inform the study of many vertebrates like dinosaurs, birds and other fossil fish. Scientists had thought that modern eyes had developed hundreds of millions of years ago. Now, they have definitive proof.

 

Quirks and Quarks: When Life Crawled Out of the Sea

This week's CBC Quirks & Quarks has a story about some of the oldest aquatic scorpions.  They are about 430 to 433 million years old and from the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario.  From the structure of their feet, scientists believe they may have emerged from the water to moult, probably to avoid predators at a very vulnerable time.  During the Silurian, there was very little life on land and what was there was very simple.

The first specimens of the new scorpion species Eramoscorpius brucensis were discovered in landscaping stone in people's backyards and patios. The rocks were quarried in Canada, but the fossils are very rare, said lead researcher Janet Waddington of the Royal Ontario Museum.  The new species fell into Waddington's hands almost by happenstance. Museum curators frequently get calls about fossils, most of which are run-of-the-mill, she told Live Science. But a woman who called about an "insect" in her backyard stone wall had something very exciting on her hands.

"When she showed me this fossil, I just about fell on the floor, it was so amazing," Waddington said.

The fossil was no insect, but rather a scorpion — and a new species at that. Over the years, more specimens trickled in, mostly from patio stones and rock quarries, and one from a mislabeled fossil at a national park on Canada's Bruce Peninsula. Now, Waddington and her team have 11 examples of the new species, ranging in length from 1.1 inches (29 millimeters) to 6.5 inches (165 millimeters).

There is an addition story at Live Science and the original paper can be found over at Biology Letters of The Royal Society.

 

Avian Genomics Project

Birds are the only surviving dinosaurs on our planet.  By 2010, only three bird species (chicken, turkey, and zebra finch) had had their genome sequenced.  The Avian Genomics Project selected 45 additional species for sequencing.  These new species represent all 32 neognath and two of the five palaeognath orders.  This allowed for a large-scale phylogenomics analysis to investigate the bird family tree, and applied comparative genomics methods to address various questions such as avian genome evolution, sex chromosome evolution, molecular basis of flight, loss of teeth, vocal learning, and endangered birds.  In addition, while consuming this large body of data, new bioinformatic methods and software tools were developed.  On December 12th, 2014, the first findings of this project were released in eight simultaneous papers in a special issue of Science and 20 more in Genome Biology, GigaScience, and other journals.  For everything you ever wanted to know about birds, visit their website at:

http://avian.genomics.cn/

 

 

 

Open Access Dinosaurs

Andy Farke has a nice article about open access science at opensouce.com.  His article lists the 36 (nearly 1 a week!) new dinosaurs described in 2014.  Of these 36, 17 were published in open access or free-to-read journals.  That's not much change from 2013's 38 new and 16 free to read.  It is, however, a better percentage.  We'll leave it to the reader to check for statistical significance.

PLOS ONE continues to dominate the world of open access dinosaur species—nine of those 17 were published there. I will be very interested to see if this trend continues into future years, particularly as more open access journals enter publication. Seven other journals hosted open access or free-to-read papers on new taxa. These included publications hosted by professional societies, “big publishers,” museums, and the like.

Overall, 2014 (17/36 new taxa are free-to-read) doesn’t reflect a big change from 2013 (16/38 free to read). I would be interested to see what percentage of the overall paleontology literature (not just alpha taxonomy) is freely available. Anyone up to collating this?

Here's his list:

Taxon	Freely readable	CC-BY?	Journal
Adelolophus	No	No
Arcovenator	No	No
Augustynolophus	No	No
Changyuraptor	No	No
Daurosaurus	No	No
Eousdryosaurus	No	No
Gobivenator	No	No
Gongpoquansaurus	No	No
Kulindadromeus	No	No
Kulindapteryx	No	No
Laquintasaura	No	No
Mercuriceratops	No	No
Panguraptor	No	No
Pentaceratops aquilonius	No	No
Plesiohadros	No	No
Qianzhousaurus	No	No
Quetecsaurus	No	No
Rhinorex	No	No
Vahiny	No	No
Zaraapelta	No	No
Zby	No	No
Allosaurus lucasi	Yes	No	Volumina Jurassica
Datanglong	Yes	No	Acta Geological Sinica
Dreadnoughtus	Yes	No	Scientific Reports
Fosterovenator	Yes	No	Volumina Jurassica
Rukwatitan	Yes	No	Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
Huangshanlong	Yes	No?	Vertebrate PalAsiatica
Anzu	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Aquilops	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Chuanqilong	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Leinkupal	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Nanuqsaurus	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Tachiraptor	Yes	Yes	Royal Society Open Access
Tambatitanis	Yes	Yes	Zootaxa
Torvosaurus gurneyi	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Yongjinglong	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Zhanghenglong	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE
Ziapelta	Yes	Yes	PLOS ONE

The discussions on that blog are about open access to technology, science, books, and information in general, a worthy cause.  Open science is an issue of which we should all be aware.  There are way too many papers published in closed journals.  Which makes it difficult for amateurs to participate.  Read more on that blog to see how the situation is improving.

Mastodon Bones Found in Michigan Backyard

When we say we enjoy finding fossils in our own backyard, we are usually speaking metaphorically.  Eric Witcke means it literally.  He and neighbor Daniel LaPoint were excavating a backyard pond at his home in Bellevue Township, Michigan, when they unearthed a paleontological treasure.  They called in the some experts from the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology and were told the 42 odd bones belonged to a 37 year old male Mastodon.  The Mastodon lived between 10,000 and 14,000 year ago.

Daniel Fisher, the director of the U of M museum, has made two trips to confirm and examine the Bellevue Township find.

He said there have been a total of about 330 confirmed mastodon bone discoveries in Michigan — but just two in the last year. Most of the bones have been found in the southern half of the lower peninsula. Sometimes people find just a tooth or tusk.

LaPoint and Witzke's collection includes several rib bones, leg, shoulder and hip bones, the base of a tusk and pieces of the animal's vertebrae.

Fisher has spent several hours looking through what they found and believes the mastodon was a 37-year-old male.

"Preliminary examination indicates that the animal may have been butchered by humans," said Fisher. Bones show what look like tool marks, in places.

The bones are between 10,000 and 14,000 years old. Fisher said once they've been donated to the museum the exact age will likely be narrowed to within 200 or 300 years.

The full story is here.

 

It's Not Nessie, But Jurassic Predator Found In Scotland

A new Ichthyosaur has been described in the Scottish Journal of Geology.  Described as looking like a "sinister dolphin", it was 14 foot long and lived about 170 million years ago.  It's name is Dearcmbara shawcrossi, which is pronounced 'jark vara'.  The name means "marine lizard" in Scottish Gaelic.  The species name is for the discoverer Brian Shawcross.  It's bones were discovered in the late 1950s on Scotland's Isle of Skye.

"During the time of dinosaurs, the waters of Scotland were prowled by big reptiles the size of motor boats,” Dr Steve Brusatte, of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, who led the study, said:

"Their fossils are very rare, and only now, for the first time we've found a new species that was uniquely Scottish."

The work was carried out by a consortium involving the University of Edinburgh, National Museums Scotland, the University of Glasgow's Hunterian Museum, Scottish National Heritage and Staffin Museum, Isle of Skye.

 

 

Utah's Dinosaur 'Death Trap' Reveals Trove of Giant Predators

National Geographic has a story about the discovery of a Jurassic aged predator trap that is  finally heading into the lab for study.   The remains, probably a bed of quicksand, were discovered about 10 years ago in Utah.  After years of work, a group of paleontologists have finally gotten the huge block of stone and bones down off the mesa where it was discovered.  There's an interesting video that shows how they got the chunk of sandstone onto the truck. 

The fossils include a prey animal skeleton, an Iguanadon, along with up to 10 specimens of Utahraptor.  The preservation is said to be exceptional.  All of the animals are thought to have died at the same time in a predator trap.  This find has significant scientific importance, as it may give us clues into animal behaviour.  Something that typically does not get preserved in the fossil record.

A nine-ton block of sandstone that was pulled from a Utah mountain late last year holds the biggest fossil trove ever found of the giant predatory dinosaur known as Utahraptor. Covered in feathers, with a huge sickle claw on each second toe, Utahraptor looked like a pumped-up version of the Jurassic Park star Velociraptor.

The fossils might help resolve a long-standing debate about whether these predators hunted in groups. In the Jurassic Park films, velociraptors were shown cooperating to chase down prey, an idea based at the time on several predators that had been found alongside an herbivore. The new fossils may help confirm whether the silver screen got it right.

 

Enormous Underwater Fossil Lemur Graveyard Found

Here's a story about an enormous underwater fossil lemur graveyard.  There's a video that shows the remains of 1000 year old skeletons.

Anthropologists and paleontologists uncovered what could be the largest single collection of lemur remains ever found. The remains were hidden in a series of underwater caves in a remote desert region of Madagascar. Described as a "lemur graveyard," the discovery of hundreds of potentially 1,000-year-old skeletons make it one of the most unique animal gravesites in the world. This discovery could be important for understanding animal and human ancestry, and result in a new era for underwater paleontology.

 

The FM's Emily Grasle Meets a Pregnant Bat and the World's Largest Spider

If you haven't seen "The Brain Scoop" on youtube, head on over here and and check it out.  In the latest show, she's searching for bats and finds a huge spider in the Amazon.  Emily is the Chief Curiosity Correspondent of the Field Museum in Chicago.  Always an interesting show.  They post new show pretty regularly about the Field Museum and research that they perform.

 

2015 ESCONI Gem, Mineral & Fossil Show, March 21 & 22

Location -

View Larger Map

 

Saturday, March 21st - 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday, March 22nd - 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Free admittance and parking !

Explore
your interests

Shop
for jewelry, gems, fossils, minerals from world-class vendors

Find
unique and interesting books at the used book sale

Learn
from members of club demonstrating their hobbies and collections

Bid and buy
gems, minerals and fossils at the
Silent Auction
and Live Auctions
(photos of some items will be posted on website a week before show)

Enjoy
amazing displays

Win
an amazing earth-science related prize in the hourly raffle if your ticket chosen

AND MORE FOR KIDS ~

Receive
a FREE collection of minerals and fossils at the Junior Booth

Play
games and do crafts at the Kiddie Corner

Split
your own geode

Accomplish
some of the requirements for badges....
 Boy Scout Geology or Archaeology Badge
 Girl Scout Jeweler Junior Craft Badge
4-H Science Project

 

Click here to see more photos of past ESCONI Shows

Download 2015 Esconi Show Flyer

Questions? Comments?

email: [email protected]

www.esconi.org

www.facebook.com/ESCONI.fb

twitter.com/ESCONI

18th Annual Coal Education Conference to be held June 16-19, 2015

The annual Illinois Coal Education Conference will be held from June 16-19, 2015.  The location will be the Rend Lake Resort and Conference Center in Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park.  Participants can earn 2 graduate credit hours through Illinois State University, in Normal, IL.  The deadline for registration is April 13, 2015.

​Each year educators from across the state attend the Annual Coal Education Conference at the Rend Lake Resort in Whittington, Illinois. The goal of the conference is to give teachers the knowledge and learning tools to incorporate first-hand information concerning coal mining to electric power generation, as well as other uses of coal into their energy lesson plans. After participating in the conference, teachers have overwhelmingly agreed that they have gained a greater understanding of and respect for this abundant mineral and the industry's economic impact on mining regions of the state.

For more information, please visit their website.