Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

Meet Aegirocassis benmoulae, One of the Largest Arthropods Ever

It's being call Frankensquid, giant lobster, man-sized swimming centipede, or just plain weird.  The name is actually Aegirocassis benmoulae and it's an anomalocaridid from the Early Ordovician Fezouata Biota of Morocco.  It measured about 2 meters (7 feet) in length and was a filter feeder that used a technique similar to modern day baleen whales.  Scientists spent about 500 hours preparing it's fossil.  It is one of the biggest arthropods that ever lived, and is far larger than the largest modern arthropod.  Originally thought to have gone extinct in the Cambrian, anomalocaridids have been found in the Ordovician and on up into the Devonian.

The original paper is in the journal Nature.

Crocodiles, Crocodiles, Crocodiles...

Just Thirteen million years ago, at least seven different species of crocodile roamed the swamps of northeastern Peru.  The details are in Science Daily, with the original paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.  Today, the Amazon basin is teeming in life.  This rich biota has it origins in the massive wetland system that existed about 10 million years ago.  Interestingly, at that time, the area, which was an interconnected system of lakes, embayments, swamps, and rivers, drained northward into the Caribbean.  The paper describes seven crocodile species, three new to science.

"The modern Amazon River basin contains the world's richest biota, but the origins of this extraordinary diversity are really poorly understood," said John Flynn, Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History and an author on the paper. "Because it's a vast rain forest today, our exposure to rocks--and therefore, also to the fossils those rocks may preserve--is extremely limited. So anytime you get a special window like these fossilized "mega-wetland" deposits, with so many new and peculiar species, it can provide novel insights into ancient ecosystems. And what we've found isn't necessarily what you would expect."

 

Preview: 2015 ESCONI Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show, March 21-22, 2015

The 2015 ESCONI Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show will be held on March 21st and 22nd, 2015 at the DuPage County fairgrounds.  There will be vendors, demonstrations, and both silent and live auctions.  Don't miss it, there will be fun for the whole family!

Here is a sampling of the auction specimens.

Amethyst

Belotelson

Fluorite

 

Oregon Archaeologists Discover 15,000 Year Old Knife

Archaeologists have discovered a 15,000 year old knife in eastern Oregon.  The finding has yet to be published in a peer reviewed journal.  But it the research holds up, it will add to mounting evidence that humans migrated to North America much earlier than previously thought.

The discovery is a small, beautiful knife carved out of a clear orange agate. One side has a number of serrated points, like a saw. The other edge has a steep, flaked edge that could have been used to scrape hides and cut meat off of bones.

“Its kind of a neat little artifact, the prehistoric version of a Swiss Army knife,” says Scott Thomas, an archeologist for the Bureau of Land Management.

Thomas believes the knife was made more than 15,000 years ago.  He’s part of a team, led by Dr. Patrick O’Grady at the University of Oregon, that is excavating an ancient human camp sheltered by a rock overhang along a now-dry stream in Eastern Oregon.

The team has found many signs of human occupants, including dozens of stone points and an old fireplace, but it has just started exploring the oldest layers of the site.

Nasa finds evidence of a vast ancient ocean on Mars

An artist’s impression of the ancient ocean on Mars, which lasted for billions of years more than was previously thought. Credits: Mars Geronimo Villanueva/Nasa

It may not be Earth science (Mars science?), but it is a interesting story with interesting implications about our nearest neighbor in the Solar System.  Were there oceans on Mars?  Would it have been the red and blue or the blue planet?

A massive ancient ocean once covered nearly half of the northern hemisphere of Mars making the planet a more promising place for alien life to have gained a foothold, Nasa scientists say.

The huge body of water spread over a fifth of the planet’s surface, as great a portion as the Atlantic covers the Earth, and was a mile deep in places. In total, the ocean held 20 million cubic kilometres of water, or more than is found in the Arctic Ocean, the researchers found.

Unveiled by Nasa on Thursday, the compelling evidence for the primitive ocean adds to an emerging picture of Mars as a warm and wet world in its youth, which trickled with streams, winding river deltas, and long-standing lakes, soon after it formed 4.5bn years ago.

Panel calls for pardon of Peter Larson

The Chicago Tribune has a story about efforts to obtain a pardon for Peter Larson.  Peter Larson was part of the team that discovered Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex back in 1990.

South Dakota lawmakers plan to ask President Barack Obama to pardon renowned paleontologist Peter Larson, whose team discovered "Sue," the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever found.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a resolution Thursday seeking a clean slate for Larson, who spent time in prison on charges unrelated to the T. rex discovery. As part of the resolution, lawmakers recognized Larson, who founded the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, S.D., in 1978, for his contributions to state's education, history and culture.

Rep. Mike Verchio, a Republican from Hill City, said he thinks Larson was overzealously prosecuted and was unaware he had broken the law.

"We were disheartened when he was sent to prison many years ago, and we are now here to present a plea to you to help us get this resolution sent on to the president to request his pardon," Verchio said of his measure. "We believe Mr. Larson has earned the right to have a clean slate."

 

Earliest Known Fossil of the Genus Homo - 2.8 to 2.75 Million Years Old

This is a close up view of the mandible just steps from where it was sighted by Chalachew Seyoum, ASU graduate student, who is from Ethiopia.  Credit: Brian Villmoare

There are quite a few stories about the new fossil find that represents the earliest known record of the genus Homo, the human genus.  The fossil specimen is represented by a lower jaw with teeth.  It was recently found in the Afar region of Ethiopia and dates to between 2.8 and 2.75 million years ago.

Summary article in Science Daily.

Related article in Science Daily.

Actual journal article in Science.

 

Palaeocast Episode 41a: Insects - Part 1

The "Palaeocast" podcast has a new episode.  The subject is "Insects".  Insects are arthropods, the most diverse phylum in the animal kingdom.  Discussed is their fossil record - when and where they first appear.  There are fossil insects as far back as the Devonian, but they are very sparse.  However, by the late Carboniferous and the Permian periods, the fossil record contains a fair bit of variety.  A good example is the diversity in the Mazon Creek biota. 

Libraries of Life

Enzo Pérès-Labourdette

The New York Times has an opinion piece about the importance of natural history museums and their collections.  Museums have been under pressure recently with budget cutbacks, changing focus, and government regulations.  That has put their collections in danger.  These collections are even more important today, as the Earth undergoes an extinction event caused by human activity and human induced climate change.  Many species of plants, animals, and fungi are disappearing before they can be completely catalogued.  Fortunately, many of these species exist in these collections.   Natural history collections are as important to modern biologists as libraries are to journalists and historians.

A taxonomist looking for minute differences between species, and a biogeographer investigating species distributions across a landscape, will find the same specimen valuable for different reasons, as will an evolutionary biologist resolving the interconnectedness and history of life, and an ecologist piecing together the intricate functions of whole ecosystems. These collections are particularly critical in today’s era of rapid ecological and climate change, providing a unique and vitally important glimpse into ecological conditions of the past.

In the same way that students of the humanities use new critical approaches to pull novel ideas out of old books, scientists regularly use new technologies — like stable isotope analysis, high-throughput DNA sequencing and X-ray computed tomography — to draw new discoveries from sometimes centuries-old specimens. The never-ending story of every specimen continues to unfold for as long as it is cared for, but threats to this care have recently accelerated.

In October 2014, a Smithsonian botanist and curator named Vicki Funk cataloged recent budgetary and curatorial cutbacks at several of our nation’s premier natural history museums, including the Field Museum in Chicago, the California Academy of Sciences and the New York State Museum. The curatorial staff at the Field Museum dropped by almost half, to 21 from 39, between 2001 and 2014, and that’s at a relatively well-funded American institution.

 

David Attenborough on When Did Our Backbones First Appear?

Smithsonian has a video about when the first backbones appeared.  It features David Attenborough visiting a Cambrian locality in China. The video includes interesting details on one of the first animals with a nodal cord.

 

 

Reminder: Burpee Museum's PaleoFest 2015 on March 14th-15th

The Burpee Museum is holding PaleoFest 2015 on Saturday, March 14th and Sunday, March 15th.  The speaker list is long and distinguished, including Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues, Dr. Paul Sereno, Dr. Stephan Brusatte, Dr. Thomas R Holtz, Jr., Dr. Tyler Lyson, Dr. Sterling Nesbitt, and many more.  The symposium focuses on the Triassic and Jurassic time periods, "The Beginning of Dinosaurs and the Origin of the Modern World."   There is a dinner on Saturday night, with a presentation by Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues.  The schedule includes workshops for the whole family.

Don't miss it as it's always a fun event!

Real Paleo Diet: early hominids ate just about everything

Very few people today live a true hunter-gatherer lifestyle – and Paleo diets likely oversimplify what would have been on the table many millennia ago. Thiery, CC BY-NC

The Paleo Diet may be very trendy.  However, the evidence shows us that it isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Early hominids ate whatever was available and convenient.  Eating "natural" foods and abstaining from "processed" foods may be healthy, but it's not because our ancient cousins ate that way.  We and the food we eat have changed greatly since the paleolithic age.

Reconstructions of human evolution are prone to simple, overly-tidy scenarios. Our ancestors, for example, stood on two legs to look over tall grass, or began to speak because, well, they finally had something to say. Like much of our understanding of early hominid behavior, the imagined diet of our ancestors has also been over-simplified.

Take the trendy Paleo Diet which draws inspiration from how people lived during the Paleolithic or Stone Age that ran from roughly 2.6 million to 10,000 years ago. It encourages practitioners to give up the fruits of modern culinary progress – such as dairy, agricultural products and processed foods – and start living a pseudo-hunter-gatherer lifestyle, something like Lon Chaney Jr. in the film One Million BC.  Adherents recommend a very specific “ancestral” menu, replete with certain percentages of energy from carbohydrates, proteins and fats, and suggested levels of physical activity. These prescriptions are drawn mainly from observations of modern humans who live at least a partial hunter-gatherer existence.

But from a scientific standpoint, these kinds of simple characterizations of our ancestors' behavior generally don’t add up. Recently, fellow anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy and I took a close look at this crucial question in human behavioral evolution: the origins of hominid diet. We focused on the earliest phase of hominid evolution from roughly 6 to 1.6 million years ago, both before and after the first use of modified stone tools. This time frame includes, in order of appearance, the hominids Ardopithecus and Australopithecus and the earliest members of our own genus, the comparatively brainy Homo. None of these were modern humans, which appeared much later, but rather our distant forerunners.

 

ESCONI Events March 2015

Fri, Mar. 13	ESCONI No General Meeting
Sat, Mar. 14	ESCONI Mineralogy Meeting 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage, - Tech Ed Building (TEC), Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: "Barite and Beryl", by ESCONI members
Fri, Mar. 20	ESCONI No Archaeology Meeting
Sat, Mar. 21-22	ESCONI Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show! - Dupage Fairgrounds Saturday:  10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday:    10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Sat, Mar. 21	ESCONI No Paleontology Meeting
Fri, Mar. 27	St. Paul Quarry Field Trip, 8:45 am, St. Paul, IN (Map), Silurian Fossils.  See details in Field Trip Post.

Winter Is Still Among Us!

It sure doesn't seem like March 1st.  Judging by this snow cover map, Winter is not showing any sign of ending.  With Spring just weeks away, there are many fossils to be found, but most have a frosty layer of snow on top.  Fear not fellow rock hounds... it will be warm soon!

 

CBC Quirks & Quarks - A Whale of a Bite

A Basilosaurus isis skull. The red represents muscle forces, and the blue color of the cranium shows that the skull has very low stress. (John Klausmeyer/Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan.)

This weeks Quirks & Quarks as a story about Basilosaurus.  Basilosaurus was a 15 meter long whale that lived 35 million years ago, during the Eocene.  Their skulls had very powerful muscles and would have provided tremendous force to both the front and back teeth.  The estimate of their bite force is 15,000 N (~3500 lbs).  That number approaches the force applied by some of the strongest biters amongst modern animals, including crocodiles and the great white sharks.

The estimates are all over the place, but just for comparison:

Humans	900 N (200 psi)
African Lion	4400 N (1000 psi)
Allosaurs	18000 N (4000 psi)
Nile Crocodile	22000 N (5000 psi)
Tyrannosaurs rex	55000 N (13000 psi)
Deinosuchus	100000 N (23000 psi)
C. Megalodon	170000 N (40000 psi)

The original paper is in PLoS One.

Other stories in Quirks & Quarks this week includes "Ancient Wheat in Britain".