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The Field Museum blog has a post about three recent fossil discoveries
Over on the Laelaps blog on National Geographic, there's an interesting post about a new Anomalocaridids - "anomalous shrimp". The group was named originally by Joseph Frederick Whiteaves, because he only had the front appendages. Much later, the rest of the body of the large arthropod was described by Conway Morris and Harry B. Whittington. This new species, Aegirocrassis benmoulae, was discovered as part of the so called Fezouata Biota in Morocco. It lived about 485 to 443 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. The whole story is in this paper in the journal Nature.
Paleontologist Jakob Vinther pointed to a rust-colored boulder sitting on the black lab table. “What do you think that is?”, he asked. I hadn’t a clue. I was used to looking at bones – often really big saurian bones – and I couldn’t pick out any endoskeletal signs in the stone. It was mostly the fossil’s size that struck me. Whatever it was, the specimen was almost as big as me. I shrugged and opened my mouth to hazard a guess, hoping that some shot in the dark would get me close to the answer, but Vinther spoke before I did. “That”, he said, “is a giant anomalocaridid.”
CREDIT: (C) VELIZAR SIMEONOVSKI, FIELD MUSEUM
ESCONI member and past president Karen Nordquist was honored by having a shark named for her. The details are in this Smithsonian.com article. The freshwater shark Galagadon nordquistae lived alongside SUE the T. rex, about 67 million years ago. More information is in the press release from the AAAS.
SUE the T. rex is the most famous fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota--the most complete skeleton ever discovered of the world's most popular dinosaur. When Field Museum scientists removed the rock surrounding SUE's bones twenty years ago, they kept the leftover sediment (called matrix). For decades, the leftover matrix sat in underground storage at the museum, until scientists and volunteers began meticulously picking through it in search of tiny fossils. They found the remains of a shark that lived in a river SUE probably drank from.
"This shark lived at the same time as SUE the T. rex, it was part of the same world," says Pete Makovicky, the Field Museum's curator of dinosaurs and one of the authors of the Journal of Paleontology study describing the new species. "Most of its body wasn't preserved, because sharks' skeletons are made of cartilage, but we were able to find its tiny fossilized teeth."
The team, led by North Carolina State University's Terry Gates, named the shark Galagadon nordquistae, a nod to its teeth, which have a stepped triangle shape like the spaceships in the 1980s video game Galaga, and to Karen Nordquist, the Field Museum volunteer who discovered the fossils.
"It was so tiny, you could miss it if you weren't looking really carefully," says Nordquist, a retired chemist who has been microsorting, or sifting through dirt to find tiny fossils, for the Field Museum for fifteen years. "To the naked eye, it just looks like a little bump, you have to have a microscope to get a good view of it."
The Mid-American Paleontology Society (MAPS) will hold its 41st National Fossil EXPO on March 29th-31st, 2019. This is the largest fossil only show in the world.
The topic this year is Trilobites and the keynote speaker is Dr. Jonathon Adrian of the University of Iowa. The keynote will be at 6:00 PM on Friday, March 29th, 2019.
MAPS EXPO:
Friday March 29: 8:00 am to 5:00 pm
Saturday March 30: 8:00 am to 5:00 pm
Sunday March 31: 8:00 am to 3:00 pm
Hotel Show:
Wednesday March 27: 3:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Thursday March 28: 10:00 am to 9:00 pm
Friday March 29: 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Saturday March 30: All Day
JAMES KUETHER/UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND
National Geographic has a story about an opalized dinosaur fossil discovered in Australia's Lightning Ridge. The fossils were found from a mine near Wee Warra in New South Wales and belong to a newly named dinosaur species called Weewarrasaurus pobeni. The animal was a herbivore about the size of a Labrador retriever. It lived about 100 million years ago in the mid-Cretaceous. The most striking feature of its skeleton is that its bones are made of opal. The bones were actually found in 2013 by Adelaide-based opal dealer Mike Poben. A full description can be found in this paper in the journal PeerJ.
“As a paleontologist I am interested, really, in the anatomy—the bones, and in this case, the teeth,” says lead author Phil Bell of the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales.
“But when you’re working in Lightning Ridge,” Bell says, “you can’t ignore the fact that some of these things are preserved in spectacular opal that’s all the colors of the rainbow.”
Like no place on Earth
Hundreds of small mines pockmark this arid landscape 450 miles northwest of Sydney. But dinosaur fossils are found here only rarely, so Bell says it is miraculous to have uncovered a fossilized jaw with teeth. (See photos of an opal mining community that lives underground in South Australia.)“It’s a truly unique area,” he adds. “There’s no place in the world like this, where you have dinosaurs preserved in beautiful opal.” This nearly 100-million-year-old specimen is hewn from the brightly colored gemstone, which formed over the course of eons from the concentration of silica-rich solutions underground.
The fossil was found in 2013 by Adelaide-based opal dealer Mike Poben, for whom the new species was named. He had bought a bag of rough opal from miners and picked through it for fossils, as he always does. One unusual piece caught his eye.
“A voice in the back of my head said, teeth,” he recalls. “I thought, Oh my God, if I have teeth here, then this is a jawbone.”
Poben held on to the potentially toothy specimen and sent the remaining opal out with a so-called runner, whose job it was to drive around Lightning Ridge trying to find a buyer. After nine days, the runner returned the bag unsold, so Poben had a further look through its contents.
“I found another piece of bone, smaller with sockets, turned it over, and then things really started exploding in my head,” he says. “When I lined the pieces up, I realized I had two pieces from the same jawbone.”
Bell, the paleontologist who would go on to formally describe the dinosaur, says his own jaw dropped the first time he saw the highly valuable fossil with its distinctive teeth in 2014. Poben subsequently donated the fossil to the Australian Opal Centre, a Lightning Ridge museum with the world’s largest collection of opalized fossils.
PBS Nova has full video of the "The Day the Dinosaurs Died" episode on their website. It originally aired back in December 2017 and is a good one!
66 million years ago, a seven-mile-wide asteroid collided with Earth, 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.
Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois
Does your child love dinosaurs?
Join us at our junior meeting!
Friday January 11th 7pm
College of DuPage
Technical Education Center West side room 1038B
Contact [email protected] with questions
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