Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

NOVA: Day the Dinosaurs Died

 

PBS NOVA has a program on the "Day the Dinosaurs Died".  The full episode is available for viewing on the PBS website!

Program Description
A seven-mile-wide asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, triggering a chain of events that coincide with the end of the dinosaurs. But experts have long debated exactly what happened when the asteroid struck and how the giant beasts met their end. Now, scientists have uncovered compelling new clues about the catastrophe—from New Jersey to the wilds of Patagonia—and an international expedition of scientists has drilled into the impact crater off the coast of Mexico, recovering crucial direct evidence of the searing energy and giant tsunami unleashed by the asteroid. Join NOVA as scientists piece together a chillingly precise unfolding of the Earth’s biggest cataclysm, moment by moment, and discover how our early mammalian ancestors managed to survive and repopulate the Earth.

 

 

 

CBC: Ancient spider cousin had 5 sets of jaws for crushing its prey

Artistic reconstruction of Habelia optata on the Cambrian seafloor. Habelia is thought to have been an active predator, eating small animals with hard carapaces, such as trilobites. (Joanna Liang/Royal Ontario Museum)

CBC has an article with new information about a Cambrian predator.  The animal, Habelia optata, lived about 508 million years ago.  It now appears that it is a relative of spiders and scorpions say researchers from the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto.  Fossil specimens of Habelia were  first collected in 1912 in the Burgess Shale by Charles Walcott.  The original paper was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

"If you're looking for a scary Hollywood creature, it probably would be the perfect one," said Cédric Aria, lead author of the study published this week in BMC Evolutionary Biology. "It's like a centipede or perhaps an insect that would have not one pair of mandibles, but five."

Each of those powerful pairs of jaws was equipped with sharp teeth and designed to crush the protective shells of its prey, likely small trilobites. In fact, a similar fossil predator was recently found in Australia with chopped up trilobite remains in its gut, said Aria, who studied Habelia during his PhD at the University of Toronto and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China.

Scientists decry Trump’s move to strip fossil treasures from Utah’s Grand Staircase monument

(Tribune File Photo) Rock formations and scenery changes each day while hiking along the Paria River on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2016.

The Salt Lake Tribune has an article about the recent Presidential to free up parts of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument for development.  There are many concerns that this change will imperil one of the world's richest paleontological areas.  Some of the researchers are now suing in federal court to halt the move.  The Grand Staircase was declared a National Monument in 1996 by then President Bill Clinton.

A 1,650 square-mile triangle bounded by the Straight Cliffs on the east and the Cockscomb on the west, the Kaiparowits contains an unbroken fossil record spanning about 25 million years of the Late Cretaceous, from 100 million to 75 million years ago — an era when ecosystems first emerged that we would recognize today, filled with flowering plants and familiar backboned animals like lizards, snakes, amphibians, turtles and mammals.

“It has really transformed how we understand the Late Cretaceous and its extinction events and what happened after the extinction events,” says David Polly, president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

On Monday, Trump flew to Utah and signed proclamations breaking the once 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument into two monuments, totaling 201,876 acres. He also trimmed the Grand Staircase-Escalante from 1.9 million acres to about 1 million, segmenting it into three smaller monuments, including a new Kaiparowits National Monument covering 551,034 acres.

The redrawn Kaiparowits preserve resembles a jigsaw puzzle piece with large areas carved out. Maps reveal that some of those carve-outs, such as Alvey Wash, overlap with mineable coal seams and old mineral leases. According to analyses by the environmental group Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and others, retired oil and gas leases on the plateau also match up neatly with areas excised from the monument by Trump’s decree.

National Geographic: Ticks That Fed on Dinosaurs Found Trapped in Amber

National Geographic has a story straight out of Jurassic Park.  The story is about the recent discovery of blood-filled ticks trapped in Burmese amber.  The amber dates to the Cretaceous period, about 99 million years old.  This places the fossil firmly into the age of dinosaurs and implies that these ticks probably feed on feathered dinosaurs.  The paper describing this discovery appeared in the journal Nature Communications.

One of these parasites is tangled up in a possible dinosaur feather found encased in a lump of amber. Another was found in a separate piece of amber from the same region and had swollen to eight times its original size, suggesting that it had been engorged with blood when it died.
The preserved plumage likely belonged either to a feathered dinosaur or a primitive type of bird known as an enantiornithine. These early and abundant birds still had small teeth in their beaks and went extinct along with the nonavian dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

“We are not able to pinpoint the exact host,” says study coauthor Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, a paleo-entomologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in the U.K. “But we can rule out modern birds, as they only appeared about 25 million years later than the age of the Burmese amber.”

NY Times: Hundreds of Fossilized Pterosaur Eggs Uncovered in China

Fossilized eggs and bones from the new discovery. CreditWang et al.

The New York Times' Trilobite blog has a story about the discovery of a more than 200 fossilized Pterosaur eggs.  The species of pterosaur is known as Hamitpterus tianshanensis and it lived in the early Cretaceous period in what is now north western China.  Xiaolin Wang discovered the eggs in a 120 million year old bone bed in the arid Gobi Desert.  Wang, a paleontologist at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, is the lead author of a paper which was published in the journal Science.

Pterosaurs terrorized the skies for more than 160 million years until they went extinct alongside the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. They are the largest animals to have ever flown, with some like the colossal Quetzalcoatlus having wingspans as large as fighter jets.

The species that laid the recently discovered eggs is known as Hamipterus tianshanensis. It lived during the early Cretaceous period and its wings stretched about 11 feet long. It also sported a thick forehead crest and had a mouth full of pointy teeth for snatching fish.

Xiaolin Wang, a paleontologist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and lead author of the study, discovered the eggs in a 120-million-year-old pterosaur boneyard in the arid Gobi Desert in northwestern China. When the pterosaurs thrived, the place was most likely a lush lakeshore. The team suggested that a strong storm most likely washed the eggs into the lake, where they were buried alongside pterosaur bones and preserved for millions of years.

When Dr. Wang discovered H.tianshanensis at the same site in 2014, he had only unearthed a handful of eggs. Later he found the motherlode.

New 245 Million Year Old Horseshoe Crab Discovered in Idaho by ESCONI Member

Live Science has a story about a new species of horseshoe crab.  The crab lived during the Triassic Period about 245 million years ago.  It was discovered by ESCONI member Trick Runions and is called Vaderlimulus tricki.  The name stems from the shape of the head shield, which resembles the helmet worn by Darth Vader from the Star Wars film series.  A team from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History in Albuquerque named the specimen and published a paper in the current issue of the German paleontological journal Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie.

The fossil of an ancient "Star Wars" Sith Lord from a long time ago, but not quite so far, far away, was recently unearthed, a new study reports. Fossilized remains of an extinct species of horseshoe crab, named after Darth Vader because the animal's bizarre shape resembles the "Star Wars" character's iconic helmet, were discovered in Idaho.

Researchers dubbed the newly discovered, 4-inch-long (10 centimeters) horseshoe crab Vaderlimulus tricki. The species name tricki honors the man who found the fossil, Trick Runions, who is part of the citizen science Dinosaur Trackers Research Group at the University of Colorado Denver.

 

CBC Quirks & Quarks - New dinosaur had duck legs, a swan neck and penguin flippers

 

CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks has a segment about a new dinosaur discovery.  The new species is called Halszkaraptor and it lived during the Cretaceous Period about 71 to 75 million years ago in what is present day Mongolia.  The original paper appeared in Nature.

Halskaraptor was somewhere between the size of a chicken and a turkey. It had an unusual array of features never seen before in one dinosaur. Halszkaraptor had a heron-like neck, flipper-type forelimbs much like a penguin, and webbed feet similar to those of a duck. Dr. Philip Currie, a professor and Canada Research Chair in Dinosaur Palaeobiology at the University of Alberta, determined that these features means it spent some time living in or very near water much like a shore-bird, which is very rare for a dinosaur. The long neck and more than 100 teeth indicate that it was able to snag small fish and insects in the water.

 

ESCONI Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show will be held on March 24th and 25th, 2018

The ESCONI Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show for 2018 will be held on March 24th and 25th at the DuPage County Fairgrounds.  Same location as last year.  Save the date!

Download the ESCONI 2018 Show Flyer

 

Holiday Party Pictures

The Holiday Party was a great time.  And, yes, there were balloons!  Afterward, we took in an excellent talk about the Maya.  Happy Holidays!