Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

Meet Sasha - the world's only baby woolly rhino

The world's first woolly rhinoceros has been found in Russia.  The species, Coelodonta antiquitatis, is thought to have gone extinct about 10,000 years ago, with many other megafauna around the world.  Currently, the remains have not been dated, but they would most likely be at least that old.  Scientists hope to extract DNA from "Sasha", as she has been named.  In 2007, a frozen carcass of am adult woolly rhino was discovered in Kolyma, Yakutia.  Woolly rhinos are much less studied than mammoths, as they are very rare.  There is hope that Sasha can give answers as to how they grew and developed, what conditions they lived in, and to which modern animals they are most closely related.

The age of the cub when it died has yet to be established, but scientists estimate it to be about 18 months old. Precise tests will be conducted to ascertain when Sasha died, with the results likely in six months. The creature's wool is well preserved, and an ear, one eye, its nostrils, and mouth are clearly visible. 

The remnants of two horns were found on the carcass. The find was made in September last year, and the preserved remains will today be handed over in Yakutsk, some 2,900 kilometres away.

Albert Protopopov, Head of the Mammoth Fauna Department of Sakha Republic Academy of Sciences, said: 'The find is absolutely unique. We can count a number of adult woolly rhinos found around the world on fingers of one hand. A baby rhino was never found before.

Who Can Save the Grand Canyon?

Smithsonian.com has a story about the effort to block the commercialization of the Grand Canyon.  The proposed $500 million development would reside on the rim of one of Earth's greatest natural treasures. 

When Teddy Roosevelt declared the Grand Canyon a national monument, in 1908, he famously said: “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.” In that sense, the Escalade is a thumb in TR’s eye. Covering hundreds of acres on Navajo Reservation land, it is arguably the most intrusive development ever proposed for the Grand Canyon—a $500 million to $1.1 billion recreation and transport facility featuring a 1.4-mile tramway equipped with eight-passenger gondolas that would carry as many as 10,000 people a day down to the river confluence, with new roads, hotels, gift shops, restaurants and other attractions. The developer—Confluence Partners LLC, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based investment group whose members’ ventures include real estate, resorts and theme parks—says construction of the Escalade could begin as early as this year.

 

Scientists have created another open-access fossil database

Science Alert has a story of a new open-access fossil database.  Known as the Fossil Calibration Database, the free, open, online resource was created by a group of 20 researchers from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the Indiana University, and others.   The project was led by Daniel Ksepla, a science curator at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT.  The data will be hosted by the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.  It joins other online fossil databases like the Paleobiology Database.

The database brings together peer-reviewed fossil information, and it will help scientists from around the world calibrate their 'molecular clocks'.

Right now, scientists compare changes between the DNA of living species to map out how long ago they diverged on life's family tree. But by comparing this information to the fossil record, they can get some sense of a timescale, and hopefully will be able to one day date all of the branching points on the tree of life.

“Molecular dating uses fossils as calibrations to inform our models of how the rate of DNA evolution varies among species, to estimate the time key groups of plants and animals evolved,” said Matthew Phillips, an evolutionary biologist from QUT, in a press release.

He explains that up until now, a lot of these evolutionary genetic studies have been calibrated using outdated and sometimes even incorrect fossil data.

“There has been a lot of disagreement between fossil and DNA researchers on the timing of major events in life’s history," added Phillips in the release. "But the new database will help them find common ground by providing molecular biologists with carefully vetted fossil data for organisms right across the tree of life.”

 

Ask Smithsonian: What's the Deepest Hole Ever Dug?

Smithsonian.com has an interesting article about the deepest hole ever dug.  The target is the Earth's mantle.  The mantle makes up 40 percent or more of the whole planet.  The Earth has a radius of 4000 miles.  The mantle accounts for about 1800 miles of that, which compares to 3 to 25 miles thick for the crust.

“If we have a better knowledge of what the mantle is and how the mantle behaves, we have better knowledge of volcanoes and earthquakes, and better knowledge of how the planet as a whole works,” said Benjamin Andrews, a research geologist and a curator for the National Rock and Ore Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Scientists took their first crack at the mantle in 1958 with Project Mohole. American engineers drilled through the Pacific Ocean floor off Guadalupe, Mexico. But Congress discontinued funding in 1966 before the drillers ever reached the mantle.

 

Mummified Monk Found in 1000 Year Old Buddha Statue

The Daily Mail has a story of a 1000 year old Buddha statue that contains the mummified remains of a monk.  After a CT scan, it was determined that the mummy was missing all of his organs.  Other research found that the monk was the Buddhist master Liuquan.  The mummy will go on display in Budapest at the Hungarian Natural History Museum until May 2015.

UC Riverside Offers $500 Cash Reward for Best Explanation of Fossil Rings from Wisconsin

UC Riverside is offering a $500 cash reward for the best explanation of fossil rings discovered in 492 million year old rocks from Wisconsin.  They are a bunch of paleontologists that want you to stretch your mind and come up with creative explanations for a real scientific problem.  So, think logically, what caused these intriguing ring-line structures on the seabed so many years ago?  Some of you may even have visited the quarry (in southwestern Wisconsin) where these fossils were found.  The contest runs through 4 P.M. Pacific Time on March 11.  You can find the rules here.  Get your entries in!

 

500 million years ago, this critter had a really bad day

The Globe and Mail has a fantastic piece on the newest fossil discoveries of animals that lived during the "Cambian Explosion" in British Columbia.  The new locality has been dubbed "Marble Canyon".  It features a slightly different assemblage of animals than what was found in the "Burgess Shale".  The exact location has been kept secret; it is known that it resides in Kootenay National Park in British Columbia, Canada.  One particular fossil of Sidneyia inexpectans might give us an indication of what it felt like to be caught in an underwater mudslide.

High up in the mountains of British Columbia’s Kootenay National Park, the exact location a secret, Jean-Bernard Caron shows me a slab of rock pried from the cliff face where we are standing. I can see something embedded in the surface, that to my untrained eye is little more than a grey-on-grey blob the size of a flattened tennis ball – nothing that I would suspect as having once been alive.

But to Dr. Caron, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, the blob is immediately recognizable as Sidneyia inexpectans, an ancient species of arthropod that would have looked like a cross between a jumbo shrimp and a sowbug. Dr. Caron points out the traces of feather-like appendages. Then he tells me exactly what it was doing the moment it died.

“Defecating, actually,” he says, indicating a darker splotch projecting from what I presume was the creature’s rear end. “He was a bit stressed, I guess, during burial.”

No kidding. One minute, about 508 million years ago, the hapless arthropod was ambling along the seafloor near an underwater cliff. The next, it was caught up in a mudslide and swept into oxygen-starved waters, where it suffocated under a thick blanket of silt along with a menagerie of other weird beasts.

 

Nature has an interesting story on the future of museum collections.  It's ironic that at a time when we need the collections to track Earth's shrinking biodiversity.  The collections themselves are becoming more and more endangered.  For various reasons, most having to do with drops or shifts in funding.  There has been a reduction in curatorial staffs and a new emphasis on molecular techniques.  In addition, many museums are concentrating on education and entertainment instead of basic research.

In 1758, with the publication of the encyclopaedic Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus attempted to classify nature — an effort that continues today at almost 8,000 natural-history collections around the world. The United States alone holds an estimated 1 billion specimens, and the global figure may reach 3 billion. The average institution displays only about 1% or less of its store. The rest — often hundreds of thousands of specimens — is catalogued and stored away, inaccessible to the public.

The collections are overseen by a dwindling corps of managers and curators — mainly taxonomists who describe species, and systematists who study the relationship between organisms. The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, had 39 curators in 2001. Today, there are just 21. At present, there is no curator of fishes — an enormously diverse class of animal. Neither The Field Museum nor the AMNH — which hold two of the largest collections in the world — has a lepidopterist on staff, even though both collections contain hundreds of thousands of butterfly and moth specimens. Similarly, the National Museum of Natural History has seen a steady drop in the number of curators — from a high of 122 in 1993 to a low of 81 last year.

The decline is not limited to the United States. “The situation in the United Kingdom is the same, or worse,” says Paolo Viscardi, chair of the UK-based Natural Sciences Collections Association and a curator at the Horniman Museum in London. Commonly, a museum will restructure its staff, replacing three or four curatorial positions with a single collections manager, and sometimes an assistant. That manager might cover every discipline, from contemporary art to the natural sciences.

Since the economic crisis of 2008, many institutions are operating with smaller budgets. The few museums that get significant numbers of research grants have shifted their science focus to molecular techniques, which are better funded than more traditional taxonomic approaches. Many museums are emphasizing education and entertainment as they cut back on curatorial staff, says Scott Schaefer, associate dean of science for collections at the AMNH. Schaefer says that he has seen significant changes in many natural-history museums since 2008. “They tend to shift away from the conduct of research to simply the telling of the story of the sciences, in the same way that Walt Disney Company may represent science as entertainment,” he says.

 

Which Came First: the Dinosaur or the Bird?

Audubon poses a question, which is a riff on an age old question.   What came first, the chicken... oops!, dinosaur or the bird?  While the world outside paleontology (and biology) is still catching up, we all know the answer... the dinosaur!  Good summary of the history of the discoveries behind this knowledge.

    

Ancient teeth may help solve a monkey mystery

According to a recent story published in the journal Nature, monkeys have lived in South America for 36 million years.  The team of researchers, from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, discovered four molars in Eastern Peru.  These molars have been dated to 36 million years ago, which is 10 million years older than any other known South American monkey fossil.  The animal, named Perupithecus ucayaliensis, is though to be about the size of a squirrel.

This news comes despite the fact that the creatures likely didn't originate on that continent, but rather evolved in Africa and somehow crossed the Atlantic.

"How and when monkeys arrived in South America remain the major questions," said Ken Campbell, curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which led the study.

Campbell also noted that its teeth also bore a striking resemblance to fossils of ancient African monkeys, giving more credence to the idea that these creatures crossed the Atlantic at some point.

How they did that remains a mystery.

"The primary hypothesis is that they floated on a raft of vegetation, but that is still a big question," Campbell said.

He points out, the journey may have been a little easier 36 million years ago since due to the shifting of the continents, the Atlantic was considerably narrower back then.

Original paper in Nature.

 

Dimetrodon, Shark Eater

An illustration of a battle between Dimetrodon and Xenacanthus.
CREDIT: Bob Bakker

Since the 1970's, paleontologists have argued about what Dimetrodon ate.  It seems that there just wasn't enough meat for all the terrestrial predators.  Now, after 11 years of research Robert Bakker, of the Houston Museum of Natural History, thinks he knows what Dimetrodon ate.  They got their fill by eating freshwater sharks.  Check out the story over at livescience.

During the early Permian, carnivores greatly outnumbered herbivores on land, so Dimetrodon filled its belly by hunting in shallow water. In the bone beds, Bakker and his collaborators uncovered 30 Dimetrodons and only two herbivores. But the fossil hunters also found masses of freshwater shark fossils intermingled with Dimetrodon teeth. Dimetrodon shed teeth throughout its life, and the lost crowns are like bullets at a crime scene, Bakker said. "This is CSI," Bakker told Live Science. "Sharks were eaten by Dimetrodon in great numbers."

Dimetrodon resembled a sail-backed Komodo dragon on steroids, and probably hunted with ease in the water. But the shark, a Xenacanth, while nowhere near as large as aDimetrodon, fought to the death. Hundreds of shark coprolites (fossil poop) in the bone beds hold Dimetrodon bone fragments. Distinctive crescent-shaped shark bites were also discovered on intact Dimetrodon bones, although the marks suggest Xenacanthus sharks were too delicate to wrench off their foes' limbs. 

In total, more than 60 Xenacanth shark fossils were intermingled with Dimetrodon teeth. (Cartilage is rarely fossilized, but the sharks left behind their protective head spines.) Three Dimetrodon teeth were imbedded in large pieces of shark cartilage. "Shark was the other red meat," Bakker said. Reptile and aquatic amphibian bones round out the chewed shark cartilage and mangled Dimetrodon bones. "We find Dimetrodon tooth marks on everything. They even ate each other," Bakker said.

 

Giant Beaver Tooth Found in Marengo, IL in McHenry County

Erich Parpart had seen nothing like it.  Was it a mammoth tusk?  A bone... maybe from a Tyrannosaurus rex?!  It was found before Christmas (2014) by the McHenry County Conservation District maintenance worker, while walking in a field in the 3000+ acre Kishwaukee Corridor near Marengo.  It has been identified as an incisor tooth from the lower jaw of a giant beaver.  The giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis, went extinct around 13000 years ago.  The whole story is in the Northwest Herald.

Parpart, a Wonder Lake resident who has been with the conservation district about a year, knew it wasn’t a cow bone. He was raised on a farm outside Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up digging cow bones out of fields. His guess was a tooth or tusk.

“It was large and had sweeping curve that didn’t look like it would fit on anything that’s around today,” he said.

Eventually, it made its way to the Illinois State Museum where JJ Saunders, a curator and chairman of the museum’s geology department, identified it as a fossilized giant beaver incisor, a prehistoric beaver that was about 8 feet long from tail to snout.

The incisor likely came from the right side of the beaver’s lower jaw, Saunders said in a news release.

“The giant beaver was the largest Pleistocene rodent in North America,” Saunders said. “It was an animal the size of a black bear inhabiting lakes and ponds bordered by swamps. We know from its teeth that the giant beaver did not fell trees, and thus did not construct dams to modify stream courses.”

 

    

Meteor Strike

Today is the second anniversary of the Chelyabinsk meteor.  PBS has their NOVA episode Meteor Strike online.  It gives the complete story of the event.  The meteor was travelling over 40,000 mph, weighed around 13,000-14,000 tons, and measured about 20 meters in diameter.  The explosion, at a height of 18 miles, had the strength of approximately 500 kilotons of TNT, which is 20-30 times larger than the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima.  It was the largest meteor strike since the 1908 Tunguska event.  The NOVA episode is very informative with discussions of meteors and what we need to do to protect the Earth.

 

CBC Quirks & Quarks - Dinosaurs May Have Taken LSD

A grass "spikelet" with fungus growing on it preserved in amber. (George Poinar)

This week's CBC Quirks & Quarks has a story about a grass "spikelet" encased in 100 million year old amber.  The amber found in Myanmar shows the top of the "spikelet" covered in a fungus known as ergot.  Due to their nature, fungi are very sparse in the fossil record. Because the ergot fungus of today is associated with the hallucinogen, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), Dr. George Poinar, a paleobiologist from Oregon State University, wondered if ingesting the ergot of yesteryear had any effect on dinosaurs of the mid Cretaceous period.

Ergot provided the precursor to LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). And people who eat ergot-contaminated rye (or other ergot-tainted grains) develop powerful muscle spasms and hallucinations. The phrase "St. Anthony's Fire" refers to both ergotism and the horrible burning feeling that ergot triggers by constricting blood vessels.

Now, it turns out that ergot has plagued grass-eaters since dinosaurs stomped the Earth. The hunk of amber from Myanmar encases an exquisitely preserved ergot fungus, perched atop a grass spikelet that grew about 100 million years ago, researchers report in the 2015 issue of the journal Palaeodiversity. The amber was excavated in a mine and collected by Joerg Wunderlich, a German paleontologist.

"This establishes for sure that grasses were in the Old World 100 million years ago," said lead study author George Poinar Jr., a zoology professor at Oregon State University.

 

 

Palaeocast Episode 40: Brachiopods - Part 2

Detail of the upper part of Yuganotheca showing the agglutinated valves, and the horseshoe-shaped lophophore. Scale bar in millimeters. Image credit: Zhifei Zheng

Part 2 of Episode 40 is up over at Palaeocast.  This time they discuss the fossil record of Brachiopods.  Their evolutionary path from the Cambrian until the present.

 

What We Know About the Earliest History of Chocolate

There's an interesting story about the early history of chocolate over at Smithsonian.  Many people think of Belgium or Switzerland when they consider the history of chocolate, However, chocolate has it's origins in Mesoamerica with the Olmecs of southern Mexico.  It might date back as far as 1500 BC.  The way they consumed chocolate would not be recognizable today. 

On a sunny morning in San Francisco's Mission District, half a dozen men and women scoot around a tiny chocolate factory, wrapping bars, checking temperature settings, sorting beans. Cacao beans that have been fermented, dried, roasted, shelled, and ground tumble with sugar in a row of shiny metal mixers. After three days of gentle mixing, the buttery smooth results will be transferred to a tempering machine to shape the cacao’s natural fat molecules into stable crystal structures.

Currently, there is a shortage of chocolate in the world.  Demand is up.  For an interesting podcast on the modern economics of chocolate, check out this Planet Money podcast from NPR.

 

Archaeology Group: Bermuda Triangle and Asiatic Echoes

On Friday Feb 20th, Eric Schmidt will be presenting on what he considers to be one of the most intriguing places on Earth, the Bermuda Triangle. While this is considered by some to be nothing more that a stretch of dangerous waters, others believe it to contain unexplainable forces that have caused the disappearance of thousands of lives, hundreds of boats and dozens of aircraft. 

 

Eric will be presenting the facts about the triangle. If you are able to make it, come with an open mind and decide for yourself.

 

Also 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. If you have seen him talk before, you will be in for a treat.  Read more about it at 

http://asiaticechoes.org/asiatic_echoes

 

Hope to see you there.

 

Bigger Than T-Rex... Spinosaurus

 

The Spinosaurus NOVA documentary is over on YouTube.  Check it out if you missed it last fall on PBS.  There are discussions on the new fossil find in Egypt and the aquatic nature of Spinosaurus, which appeared in an article in the National Geographic Magazine back in September 2014.  Enjoy!

The Fossil Forum

Have you tried the Fossil Forum?  Lots of great information on fossils of all types.  There are forums on Fossil Hunting Trips, Fossil ID, Questions & Answers, and Fossil Preparation.  The monthly Fossil of the Month is always amazing.  Fossil Sites is a useful resource to find new places to hunt, either locally or when you are on vacation.  Check it out this winter for great discussion with a bunch of good and helpful people of like mind.

 

Science Friday: Picture of the Week

Morning Glory thermal spring, in Yellowstone National Park (photo taken in August 2012). Credit: Joseph Shaw, Montana State University

Science Friday's Picture of the Week is of the Morning Glory thermal spring, in Yellowstone National Park.  It hasn't always had the colors you see today.  Scientists used biological, chemical, and optical data to construct a mathematical model of how the spring has changed over time.  Tourists have been tossing coins, rocks, and other debris into it for decades.  That debris has partially blocked the underground heat source and lowered the temperature.  Now, the spring is home to photosynthetic microorganisms that probably couldn't tolerate the conditions before the contamination.  The model was described in a paper in the Journal of Applied Optics.

Pigments produced by swaths of those microbes—called microbial mats—are responsible, at least in part, for the brilliant yellows, greens, and oranges that now tinge Morning Glory and other thermal pools in Yellowstone. Each species has a preferred temperature, according to Brent Peyton, director of the Thermal Biology Institute at Montana State University. Because the springs are “hottest at the center and typically coolest at the edges,” a color gradient appears, he says.

But the colors we see also depend on the way light interacts with the water at different depths, a phenomenon that intrigued Joseph Shaw, director of the Optical Technology Center at Montana State University, and his team. “We lived right up the road from Yellowstone and were always wondering about the optics [of the pools],” he says.