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The recipient of the ESCONI Student Research Grant for 2019 (administered by the Paleontological Society) is Lane Allen, an MS student at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, TX. The title of his research is "Paleolimnological Assessment of Harmful Algal Bloom Trends in Texas Lakes". Congratulations!
Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) are responsible for economic losses in tourism and fishing industries. The environmental factors that drive bloom formation and toxin production are not well understood. By identifying the environmental stressors that prompt HABs, lake management strategies can be improved to reduce HABs and unhealthy lake occurrences. This project will investigate the dynamics of HABs in Texas reservoirs over the past ~100 years in order to identify potential trends of increasing bloom events like those occurring in northern lakes, correlating those trends with potentially important environmental stressors. Diatom subfossils will be collected from sediment cores collected from three Texas reservoirs, and their relative species abundance will be used to infer environmental conditions over the last 60-80 years. Sedimentary DNA from those cores will indicate the occurrence of bloom events, and further HPLC analysis determine if blooms were toxin producing. The occurrence of events such as floods and drought will be detected using X-ray diffraction, which assesses mineral composition and grain size. The cores will be dated using Cs-137, charcoal deposits, and sedimentation rate data maintained for the reservoirs. This project serves to develop the potential to apply paleolimnological techniques to reservoirs, which are largely understudied due to their short lifespan and challenges associated with their hydrology and deposition. Nonetheless, reservoirs are commonly used sources of freshwater and often the only source of paleolimnological records in arid regions, and contain a wealth of untapped data.
Illustration of Didelphodon, a marsupial relative from the Late Cretaceous with the strongest pound-for-pound bite force of any known mammal. Credit: Misaki Ouchida
Phys.org has an article about Mammals during the "Age of Dinosaurs". In a paper in Trends & Evolution, a review paper summarizes the latest fossil evidence of the state of Mammals and their relatives during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. It seems that Mammals were flourishing and experienced a couple ecological radiations during this time.
Paleontologists are trying to dispel a myth about what life was like when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The false narrative has wormed its way into books, lectures and even scientific papers about this long-ago era.
The myth's focus isn't on dinosaurs. Its main characters are ancient mammals and their relatives, which together are known as mammaliaforms. According to the myth, a world crowded with dinosaurs left little room for mammaliaforms. As a result, mammals and their kin remained tiny, mouse-like and primitive. The myth posits that mammals didn't evolve diverse shapes, diets, behaviors and ecological roles until the K-Pg mass extinction event 66 million years ago killed off the dinosaurs and "freed up" space for mammals.
"This is a very old idea, which makes it very hard to defeat," said David Grossnickle, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. "But this view of mammaliaforms simply doesn't stand up to what we and others have found recently in the fossil record."
As part of the run up to ESCONI's 70th Anniversary, here is Flashback Friday post #7. If you have pictures or stories to contribute, please send them over to [email protected]. Thanks!
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Here's a report from Matthew Galloway's discovery of an amphibian bone in the Lone Star Quarry on June 4th, 2000. What a find!
Matthew Galloway's Exciting Discovery
Call it beginner’s luck. A ten (10) year old LaMoille boy was excited about going on his first field trip with the Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois (ESCONI), then he made an exciting discovery.
"I joined the club because I wanted to go on field trips with people who know more than I do" said Matthew Galloway, who has been collecting fossils since he was six (6).
During that first field trip with the club, he spotted a bone embedded in stone which turned out to be the most significant specimen found by 38 people searching for fossils in a LaSalle County quarry on June 4.
"This is the best thing I have found" said Matthew. The club’s field trip coordinator, Bealis Giddings of Mazon, told Matthew and Bruce Galloway the fossils was a leg bone from an amphibian known as a tetrapod.
Giddings has searched for fossils in upper Illinois River Valley quarries for ten (10) years.
"This is the biggest one I have seen. It is at least six times bigger than any I had seen," Giddings said.
Everyone involved in the field trip expressed appreciation to the quarry owners for giving them permission to look for fossils.
Bruce Galloway brought the fossil to the attention of Michael Philips, a geology instructor at Illinois Valley Community in Oglesby who took digital pictures of the fossil. He confirmed that the Galloways had found a tetrapod (a four-legged animal that looks like a mud puppy) from the Pennsylvanian Age (286-320 million years ago).
Philips e-mailed photos of the bone to Russ Jacobson, a geologist and paleontologist at the Illinois State Geological Survey in Champaign. "It is a nice specimen of a lower limb bone of a tetrapod", Jacobson said. "It may not tell us much about the species, but it is a record of another one".
For further information, click on Mike Phillips: Amphibian Leg Bone Fossil
(http://www2.ivcc.edu/phillips/fossil/amphibian/amphibian.html)
Matthew(10 years old) and Barrett Galloway(14 years old) with their fossils at the Sept. 16, 2000 ESCONI Show and Tell. Matthew is holding a tetrapod bone found June 4 at the Lone Star Quarry. Barrett is holding a pavement tooth of a shellcrusher shark embedded in limestone found September 4 at Illinois Cement Quarry.
Gizmodo has an interesting article in which they ask various researchers their favorite pet among extinct animal. You probably don't want something that may eat you... what about a trilobite! All you need is a saltwater tank.
With de-extinction hovering on the edge of being a thing, it is worth asking at least one question. That question is not “why?” or “is this a good idea??”—if it can be done, it will be, and that’s that. No—the question is: which formerly extinct animals should we domesticate? The cat/dog paradigm has reigned for far too long; whole new realms of cuteness and companionship might be in store for us, once we start reviving woolly mammoths and Great auks. For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of extinct-animal experts for their take on which one might make the best bet.
Over on the Fossil Forum, an ESCONI member, Ralph Jewel, has an fantastic report on Pit 11 collecting. He's got a bunch of old and new pictures for comparison. Additionally, he has some maps and directions to show you where to collect. The Tipple, ESCONI Hill, Monster Lake, and Ponderosa Lake are all mentioned. Check it out! The Fossil Forum is a great resource!
The remains of 259 fish of the extinct species Erismatopterus levatus.CreditCreditMizumoto et al.
The New York Times has a post about a fossil plate that includes a whole shoal of fish. The plate, which dates to about 50 million years ago, measures 22 inches by 15 inches. It contains a group of fish that belong to the extinct species called Erismatopterus levatus. All the details are in a paper that was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Fish can band together, sometimes in the millions, to form a school or shoal. They will move as one, like a flock of birds, so long as each fish stays in line with the fish that surround it.
Modern fish, as well as other kinds of animals, already know how to move as one. But unraveling when in Earth’s deep past this behavior evolved has been a tough fish to fry for scientists.
It’s difficult, for instance, to find evidence of schooling fish in the fossil record. You need just the right circumstances to fossilize something like a school of fish in place within a rock. Then, that rock has to survive intact long enough for a paleontologist to discover it and study it.
But that is just what may have happened.
Fossil horseshoe crab from Mazon Creek, Illinois. Not a dinosaur.
Roy Plotnick has an insightful blog post over on Medium. He discusses perceptions of paleontologists and Paleontology in general - who they are, what they do, and why it's important. Check it out! If you've read any of his previous posts, you'll know it's a great read!
The confusion with archaeologists is of somewhat understandable; scientists of both fields can spend a lot of time outdoors digging old stuff up from the ground. There are also strong overlaps in methods and concepts. Archaeologists and paleontologists are interested in dating what they have uncovered (although we rarely use carbon dating), in reconstructing the environment they formed in, and in the processes of biological decay. The theory of evolution underlies the two fields. Both sciences would also disavow Indiana Jones, who was not a paleontologist and was a very bad archaeologist (theft of cultural heritage, anyone?). Scientists from both disciplines also often collaborate. But at core, archaeologists are interested in the history of humanity, which is outside the scope of paleontological research.
Some paleontologists do indeed study dinosaurs. But most don’t. Dinosaurs, as wonderful as they are, are only a tiny fraction of the life that has lived on Earth and have been preserved as fossils. In truth, the majority of us study other parts of the huge tree of life and its history, which mainly occurred well before the first sauropod or theropod appeared.
Here are some photos from the June 2019 General Meeting. The presentation was given by Michele Micetich. Her program is about the Diamond Mine Disaster that occurred in 1883 at the Diamond No. 2 mine near Coal City, IL. Michele is curator of the Carbon Hill School Museum in Carbon Hill, IL. You can learn more on their website.
The program was very good and it led to some lively discussions. Here are some pictures.
2-Day Moving Sale
Friday & Saturday June 21 & 22, 2019
10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
ROCK BOTTOM PRICES!!
Items for sale include:
Lapidary Materials – slabs, rough & polished stone
Mineral Specimens – assorted sizes
Rocks & Fossils
Furniture, Cabinets, Fixtures & More!
**All Sales Final**
Sold items must be removed from the premises by 5 p.m. Saturday June 22nd, 2019
Methods of payment accepted: Visa/Mastercard/Discover and Cash
More details here!
As part of the run up to ESCONI's 70th Anniversary. Here is Flashback Friday post #6. If you have pictures or stories to contribute, please send them over to [email protected]. Thanks!
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Kathy Dedina had some great pictures from past ESCONI events. Here are a series of pictures from a Pit 11 field trip in September 1976. Notice the lack of vegetation! It looks much different today.
Learn about Illinois fossils including the Tully Monster!
Every Friday from 11am to 1pm, meet members of our scientific staff in the Grainger Science Hub and learn about their latest discoveries and newest research. They'll bring real artifacts and specimens from the museum’s collection of nearly 40 million objects. You never know what you might discover when you meet a scientist, from natural habitat restoration to preparing new mammal species for installation.
This program is free with museum admission. Join us for this hands-on opportunity to learn what our scientists do every day.
