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The Burpee PaleoFest will be held from Friday, March 1st to Sunday, March 3rd, 2019. Don't miss it!
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The Grand Canyon National Park is 100 years old today. There's many posts out on the internet. Here are a few... NPR, CNN, Fortune, and Outside Magazine.
On February 26, 2019, the Grand Canyon celebrates 100 years since it's designation as a national park. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Grand Canyon welcomes approximately six million domestic and international visitors each year. After 100 years, whether its hiking a corridor trail, taking a stroll on the rim or enjoying the landscape from an overlook, Grand Canyon continues to provide a space for all visitors to connect with the outdoors.
This 2019, Grand Canyon National Park will commemorate the past and inspire future generations to experience, connect with, and protect the park's unique natural, cultural, and historic resources.
Whether you are a regular visitor, a national park traveler or virtual explorer, Grand Canyon National Park hopes that you are inspired to experience and connect with a park that has inspired 100 years of stewardship and will continue to delight visitors and stewards for another 100 years! Come. Be Inspired. Go Grand.
LiveScience has an interesting story about some bizarre creatures found in Morocco. The animals are called stylophorans and lived during the Ordovician. The fossils were discovered in 2014 in the Fezouata Formation. They are now identified as echinoderms and are related to modern animals such as sea urchins, starfish, brittle stars, and sea lilies. The original paper was published in the February 2019 issue of Geobios.
For the past 150 years, scientists have hotly debated a mysterious creature that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, long before dinosaurs walked the Earth. And now, with the discovery of stunningly detailed fossils in Morocco, paleontologists have finally ID'd the bizarre life-forms.
The creatures, known as stylophorans, looked like flattened and armored wall decorations that had a long arm poking off their sides. But while it was previously unclear where they fit in the animal family tree, the new study revealed that they are echinoderms, the ancient relatives of modern animals such as sea urchins, starfish, brittle stars, sea lilies, feather stars and sea cucumbers.The finding was made possible thanks to fossils with "unequivocal evidence for exceptionally preserved soft parts, both in the appendage and in the body of stylophorans," said study lead researcher Bertrand Lefebvre, a National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) researcher at the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon in France. [Photos: Trove of Marine Fossils Discovered in Morocco]
The incredible fossils were unearthed during an excavation in 2014 at the Fezouata Formation, located along the edge of the Sahara Desert in southern Morocco. The excavation yielded a bounty of fossils, including about 450 stylophoran specimens, each dating to about 478 million years ago.
But the researchers didn't immediately realize that some of the fossils included preserved soft tissues. "It is only when we unpacked and looked at them under the binocular [microscope], back in the laboratory in Lyon, that we could see the soft parts," Lefebvre told Live Science in an email. "Their presence and identification were then confirmed by SEM (scanning electron microscope) observations and analyses."
Save the Date! Just one month until the ESCONI Show!
Saturday, March 23rd - 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday, March 24th - 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Free admittance and parking!
Explore
your interests
Shop
for jewelry, gems, fossils, minerals from world-class vendors
List to Follow Soon, Stay tuned!
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 from the
Field Museum & Lizzadro Museum
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, Collections, or Archaeology Badge
Girl Scout Jeweler Junior Craft Badge
4-H Science Project
Click here to see more photos of past ESCONI Shows
Download 2019 Esconi Show Flyer
Questions? Comments?
email: [email protected]
www.esconi.org
www.facebook.com/ESCONI.fb
twitter.com/ESCONI
Location -
A life reconstruction of North America’s newest tyrannosaur - Moros intrepidus (Lindsay Zanno)
CBC's Quirks & Quarks has a segment about a tiny tyrannosaur that helps shed light on how T-rex grew so large. The animal, Moros intrepodus, was found by Dr. Lindsay Zanno. She's head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and research professor at N.C. State University in Raleigh. You might remember when she was at the Field Museum. She spoke at an ESCONI general meeting about "Resurrecting Dinosaurs" back in 2009. The paper appeared in Nature's Communication Biology.
Scientists have discovered a fossil from oldest and tiniest Cretaceous tyrannosaur ever found in North America — one that's baby-sized compared to its descendant, the ferocious and massive Tyrannosaurus rex.
But even a baby-sized tyrannosaur would have been intimidating. "It would have been 5 feet high at the head, so this is an animal that would have been able to stare you right in the eyes," said Dr. Lindsay Zanno, the head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and a research professor at N.C. State University in Raleigh.
Her team had been working in Utah looking for fossils for ten years before they discovered what's turned out to be a hind leg of a fully grown new mini tyrannosaur.
"When I first found these bones sticking out of the side of a hill and recognized them as being from a small theropod, it was really, really exciting for the team," said Zanno.
The Burpee PaleoFest will be held from Friday, March 1st to Sunday, March 3rd, 2019. Don't miss it!
Quick Links:
John Ostrom was born February 18th, 1928. He was the paleontologist that changed the way we look at dinosaurs. Before him, they were slow, dump, plodding animals that couldn't help but go extinct. Many researchers in his day thought them scientifically boring. Wow, how far they had fallen from the early 20th century. While digging up Deinonychus in 1964, it struck him that if he didn't know he was digging up a dinosaur, he'd have sworn he was digging up a giant bird. And thus, the dinosaur renaissance was born. The Yale Alumni has a great feature article from 2014 about John Ostrom.
In the summer of 1970, early in the research that would radically transform how we think about birds, dinosaurs, and the origins of animal flight, Yale paleontologist John H. Ostrom was traveling through Europe studying pterosaur fossils. His itinerary took him, in early September, to the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands. Ostrom, then 42, was an unprepossessing figure and the world’s leading authority on dinosaurs, and the museum curator was pleased to leave him alone with the twin halves of the limestone slab catalogued TM6928 and 29.
This fossil was a dinner plate–size muddle of limb fragments, vertebrae, and ribs preserved in limestone from the Solnhofen beds. It had been discovered near Riedenburg, Germany, in 1855 and named by the great nineteenth-century paleontologist Hermann von Meyer. Von Meyer later became famous for the first scientific description, in 1861, of Archaeopteryx. Coming just after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the unveiling of that 150-million-year-old urvogel, or archetypal primitive bird, made an international sensation. With Archaeopteryx, it seemed as if the proof of evolutionary theory had arrived, like the Ten Commandments, engraved in stone. But in 1857, the confusing fossil von Meyer was describing—the future TM6928 and 29—seemed like something far more ordinary: another pterosaur, a type of flying reptile. He dubbed it Pterodactylus crassipes.
That didn’t make sense to Ostrom as he puzzled over the ankles, toes, and arm bones of the fossil that day in 1970. He could envision the ways they might fit together just by examining the proportions of the bones and the shape of their articulations. But it wasn’t like any pterosaur he had ever seen. Ostrom had recently finished describing a remarkable dinosaur he had discovered a few years earlier in Montana. His monograph on Deinonychus included exquisitely detailed descriptions showing how the bone endings and attachments helped make these dinosaurs such fast, agile little killers. To Ostrom, the bones of the Teylers specimen looked an awful lot like those of Deinonychus. And there was something more.
Visit Indiana has a piece about the change in name for the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore to Indiana Dunes National Park! It was approved on February 15, 2019.
The country’s 61st national park hugs 15 miles of the southern shore of Lake Michigan and has much to offer. Whether you enjoy scouting for rare species of birds or flying kites on the sandy beach, the national lakeshore’s 15,000 acres will continually enchant you. Hikers will enjoy 50 miles of trails over rugged dunes, mysterious wetlands, sunny prairies, meandering rivers and peaceful forests. Want to learn more about America’s newest national park? Check out this video from the folks at Indiana Dunes.
Rep. Lance Yednock has proposed a bill to convert the former Lone Star Quarry into a Fossil Park.
Synopsis As Introduced
Amends the Department of Natural Resources (Conservation) Law of the Civil Administrative Code of Illinois. Provides that the Department of Natural Resources shall designate a portion of the former Lone Star Quarry site near Oglesby as a fossil park to allow for the collection of fossils. Provides that Department by rule may designate which portion of the land shall constitute the fossil park and any requirements for admittance or permits for entry into the fossil park. Provides that the Department may collaborate with any State university to establish educational opportunities or events at the fossil park.
Saturday, March 23rd - 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday, March 24th - 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Free admittance and parking!
Explore
your interests
Shop
for jewelry, gems, fossils, minerals from world-class vendors
List to Follow Soon, Stay tuned!
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 from the
Field Museum & Lizzadro Museum
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, Collections, or Archaeology Badge
Girl Scout Jeweler Junior Craft Badge
4-H Science Project
Click here to see more photos of past ESCONI Shows
Download 2019 Esconi Show Flyer
Questions? Comments?
email: [email protected]
www.esconi.org
www.facebook.com/ESCONI.fb
twitter.com/ESCONI
Location -
On February 16th 2019, the Coal City Public Library District will host a talk by Michele Micetich, of the Carbon Hill School Museum in Carbon Hill, IL, about the Diamond Mine Disaster, which occurred 136 years ago on February 16th, 1883. This is one of the worst mining disasters ever in Illinois. There is a roadside monument to commemorate the disaster. Her presentation will feature past events, shared stories, and old pictures and artifacts. Refreshments will be served. The event will be held in a Meeting Room at the Coal City Public Library from 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM.
