Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

ScienceNews: The Smithsonian’s ‘Deep Time’ exhibit gives dinosaurs new life, Reopens today, June 8th, 2019!

PREHISTORIC SCENE  The Smithsonian’s updated fossil hall displays snapshots of the past, such as this Diplodocus reaching out to feed from a tree.  LUCIA MARTINO, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

ScienceNews has an article about the reopening of the dinosaur hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.  Today, June 8th, 2019 is the long awaited day.  It's called the "David H. Koch Hall of Fossils - Deep Time".  The renovations have taken 5 years to complete.  The exhibit starts with humans and goes backwards through millions and billions of years.  Check it out on your next visit to Washington!

After five years, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., is finally reopening its dinosaur hall on June 8. Visitors may come for fan favorites like Tyrannosaurus rex and Stegosaurus — and these fossils are gorgeously presented. But the new, permanent exhibition, the “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils — Deep Time,” has a much grander story to tell about the history of life on Earth, how organisms have interacted with each other for eons and how they’ve interacted with Earth and its climate.

Counterintuitively, the exhibition starts with humans.

Many exhibitions about the evolution of life tend to open with abstract concepts: the chemical formula for life or primordial microbes that lived in shallow seas. But the “Deep Time” designers wanted visitors to immediately feel their own part in the story, says exhibition project manager Siobhan Starrs. So the exhibition starts in the present and moves backward through time.

“The big, big starting point is that life is all connected, through billions of years of time,” she says. Scientists refer to that vastness of time on a geologic scale as deep time, a term suggesting a long, durable thread connecting the past to the present.

 

ESCONI Flashback Friday #5: Dinner With Dr. Frederick Schram in August, 2011

As part of the run up to ESCONI's 70th Anniversary.  Here is Flashback Friday post #4.  If you have pictures or stories to contribute, please send them over to [email protected].  Thanks!

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Mary Fairchild did an excellent report about her dinner with Dr. Frederick Schram in August, 2011.  There is much to enjoy in the report, including facts about early Mazon Creek projects, the people that did research, and the collectors who contributed fossils.  You'll find many familiar names listed with details about their contributions.  It's a good thing many are still with us, so many years later.  Enjoy!

Rob Sula, Dr. Frederick R. Schram, Jack Wittry, Jim Fairchild.--August, 2011.

The Mazon Creek site is very significant because of the diversity of life compared to other Lagerstatten.  Frederick R. Schram (2)

 

In August,  ESCONI members Rob and Sondra Sula, Jack and Charlene Wittry, and Jim and I met with Dr. Frederick Schram at the Two Brothers Roundhouse in Aurora, Illinois.  Dr. Frederick Schram had been spending some time at the Field Museum where, in 1965, he first began his work with Mazon Creek fossils as a graduate student.  The Field Museum's collection is considered the most comprehensive collection of Mazon Creek fossils.  

Dr. Frederick R. Schram is a palaeontologist and carcinologist who has roots in the  The Mazon Creek Project. Schram received his B.S. in biology from Loyola University in 1965, and a Ph.D. on palaeozoology from the University of Chicago in 1968 and has written over 200 papers on various aspects of crustacean biology, taxonomy and systematics, as well as several books, including the standard text Crustacea. He also wrote a chapter on crustaceans in The Richardson's Guide to the Fossil Fauna of Mazon Creek. (1) 

In 1983, Schram founded the journal Crustacean Issues, which he continued to edit for over twenty years. Much of his career has been spent at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from which he retired in 2005. In July 2005, he became the Editor of the Journal of Crustacean Biology which is a peer-reviewed scientific journal in the field of carcinology (crustacean research).

In the fall of 2006, Schram was the special guest speaker at the Mazon Creek Open House hosted at the Lizzadro Museum in Elmhurst. The night before, he spoke at the ESCONI General Meeting and discussed his roots in the  The Mazon Creek Project: 

Forty years ago, Gene Richardson and Ralph Gordon Johnson were the founders of the first real Mazon Creek study in Braidwood. George Langford structured the project and was able to get grant money for it. 

Ferns were always plentiful, but Gene Richardson chose to do his PhD at Princeton on the insects of Mazon Creek. In 1958 Mr. Tully came to the Field Museum with his Tully Monster.

In 1965 Fred Schram arrived. He was was a graduate student of Ralph Gordon Johnson and he described two faunas of Braidwood clams. 

Then June Douglas (Mother of Dave Douglas of Dave's Down to Earth Rock Shop) found the first coleiod cephelopd that was published in Science and funds started to come in. Gene Richardson was focused on working with amateurs and was a gracious diplomat. He worked well with amateur collectors as he tried to build up the Field collection. 

When they began to put more field crews from the Museum into the field to collect. Charlie Shabica was the field boss of the students and Milburn MacKay was the Peabody geologist on the site. Many of the people involved then have gone on to noteworthy careers today. 

Charlie Shabica, a specialist in regional geology, developed how Pit 11 was deposited in a Pennsylvanian-deltaic model.

Ida Thompson developed an early interest in annelid worms and did a monograph on polychaete worms. 

Jim Edwards went to the National Science Foundation and then to become the Director of GBIF in Copenhagen.

Richard Wassersug is Professor of Biology at Dalhousie in Nova Scotia.

After the 1960s Ralph Johnson and Gene Richardson ended their partnership. Gene remained with Mazon Creek and Ralph moved on to other projects. Gordon Baird mapped Mazon Creek in the 1970’s. Gene retired in 1983 and died shortly thereafter and the Mazon Creek Project moved to Northeastern Illinois University. Later an NSF grant to the Field Museum in the late 1980’s with Brent Beall was to catalog the massive collection. This was a chance for Schram to rewrite his dissertation.  Frederick Schram (2)

The Mazon Creek area includes the following counties of Northeastern Illinois: Will, Grundy, Kankakee, LaSalle, and Livingston. The fossils are preserved in ironstone concretions or nodules which preserved many soft-bodied animals and plants that are rarely fossilized. During the Pennsylvanian this area of Illinois was covered with coastal swamps, deltas, and upland forests situated along an estuary bay. The fossils include animals and plants that lived in the surrounding swamps and forests; as well as animals that lived in fresh and brackish water of the rivers, ponds, and estuary; and some marine animals that lived in the shallow sea covering Western Illinois. The Field Museum's collection is the most comprehensive collection of these fossils. (5)

Mazon Creek fossils are most complete known record of late Paleozoic life. These extraordinary fossils rank impressively alongside with the Cambrian Burgess Shale fauna of Canada, the Devonian Bundenbach and Jurassic Solnhofen faunas of Germany, and the Cretaceous Santana fauna of Brazil. (3)

References
1. Frederick R. Schram; Wikipedia.
2. 11/10/06, ESCONI Newsletter. 
3. Mazon Creek Fossils  
4.  The Mazon Creek Project
5.  Mazon Creek Fossil Invertebrates ; The Field Museum.
6.  Dave's Down to Earth Rock Shop; Evanston, Illinois.
7.  Mazon Creek Fossils; Illinois State Museum.

Infernovenator steenae, a new serpentine recumbirostran from the ‘Mazon Creek’ Lagertätte further clarifies lysorophian origins

The Zoological Journal has a another new paper describing a Mazon Creek vertebrate.  This one is called Infernovenator steenae.  The paper is authored by Arjan Mann, Jason D Pardo, and Hillary C Maddin of the Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, CA.  Earlier this year, Mann and Maddin published a description of a "microsaur" species named Diabloroter bolti.  As before, the sculpture in the picture was created by David Duck, who has been an ESCONI member.  Wow!  Congrats yet again!

The Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian; 309–307 Mya) ‘Mazon Creek’ Lagerstätteproduces some of the earliest tetrapod fossils of major Palaeozoic lineages. Previously, the Mazon Creek record of lysorophians was known from a single poorly preserved specimen consisting only of a partial vertebral column. Here we describe a new, virtually complete lysorophian genus and species, Infernovenator steenae gen. & sp. nov. on the basis of a unique combination of characters, including a near complete circumorbital series and the retention of a postfrontal. Parsimony-based phylogenetic analysis placed the new taxon in the family Molgophidae, as sister to Brachydectes newberryi. Those results and the more generalized cranial morphology present in Infernovenator further support a recumbirostran origin of Molgophidae. Co-occurrence of two morphologically and functionally distinct molgophids in the Early Moscovian suggests a rapid and underappreciated diversification of this family in the Early Pennsylvanian.

 

Ticks, Ticks, Ticks, Ticks, Ticks!

As the weather gets warmer (and hopefully, dryer), you might be spending more time outside looking for fossils, minerals, etc. in the woods, fields, and quarries.  One creature you may encounter is a tick.  Ticks are arthropods, which unfortunately are vectors for a number of serious diseases.  In Illinois, American Dog (Wood), Brown Dog, Lone Star, and Deer ticks are some of the more common species in Illinois.

Here are some resources to learn more about avoiding ticks, treating bites, and getting medical attention if you get do come down with any disease symptoms.

• Ologies Podcast with Alie Ward has a great episode on Ticks.  BTW, it's a great podcast to learn more about any type of science.
• VOX has an interesting post about why there isn't a Lyme Disease vaccine.  Spoiler, there is!  Unfortunately, anti-vaccine sentiment has led to it being pulled from the market. 
• The University of Rhode Island runs the TickEncounters.com website with great information about all things tick!  Check out their blog Tick Notes.
• The Illinois Department of Public Health has information about ticks in Illinois.  Check for information in your state.  Check out the tick flyer.

 

 

National Geographic: Gem-like fossils reveal stunning new dinosaur species

Bob Foster, with his wife, Jenny Foster, at the Australian Opal Center in Lightning Ridge. Mr. Foster discovered the opalized bones of Fostoria in the 1980s. Credit Jenni Brammall

The National Geographic has a story about the discovery a new dinosaur in Australia.  The animal, called Fostoria dhimbangunmal, lived about 150 million years ago.  It's an early member of a group that will eventually evolve into duck-billed hadrosaurs.  The bones are opalized and was discovered near a town called Lightning Ridge, famous for brightly colored opals.  All the details are in a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“Any time we find a new Australian dinosaur it’s interesting, because we have so few,” says Stephen Poropat, a paleontologist from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne who was not on the study team. The tally of known Australian dinosaurs is currently around 24, he notes, including Weewarrasaurus, another species from Lightning Ridge described last year.

The newest species, Fostoria dhimbangunmal, was an Iguanodon-like dinosaur that lived about a hundred million years ago during the mid-Cretaceous period, when this region was a broad floodplain with lakes and rivers flowing into the inland Eromanga Sea.

“The floodplains were frequently wet and richly vegetated, meaning they were a good place for plant-eating dinosaurs,” says study leader Phil Bell, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales.

Studying dinosaurs from the time slice at Lightning Ridge is important, Poropat adds, as the world was then experiencing the warmest conditions of the past 150 million years.

“These dinosaurs were living in a really incredible greenhouse Earth,” he says. “The globe would have potentially looked quite different, and these fossils can tell us how these dinosaurs were coping.”

 

Why Did These Human-Sized Beavers Go Extinct During the Last Ice Age?

The Smithsonian.com has a post about the extinction of 7 foot tall beavers.  Up until just over 10,000 years ago, large beavers weighting upwards of 220 pounds roamed a large part of North America, from Alaska and Canada to Florida.  A new study, by a group of Canadian researchers, was published in the journal Scientific Reports.  It posits that these giant rodents went extinct when their habitat became increasing dry and warm at the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago.

Yukon News' Hong reports that scientists believe the giant beaver migrated from what is now the continental United States to Canada and Alaska around 100,000 years ago. The species thrived in verdant mixed-conifer forests intermingled with plant-filled wetlands for many millennia, but began to suffer the ill effects of Earth’s drier climate beginning 25,000 years ago. At first, local populations vanished mainly from northern territories, but by 10,000 to 11,000 years ago—only one beaver enclave, found in the surrounding Great Lakes region—remained.

Writing for the Conversation, Plint explains that giant beavers—distinguished from their smaller modern counterparts by bulkier curved incisors and an elongated rather than paddle-shaped tail—failed to adapt to the continent’s changing climate largely because of their overdependence on wetland habitats.

Today, modern beavers, which actually co-existed alongside giant ones for tens of thousands of years, were able to use their sharp-edged teeth to cut down and eat trees, build lodges and dams, and essentially shape the landscape to suit their needs. Ancient mega-sized ones, however, found themselves ill-equipped to seek out new habitats and food sources.

 

ESCONI Events June 2019

Field trips require membership, but visitors are welcome at all meetings!

Sat, June 8rd	ESCONI Field Trip, Rockford Area Gravel Pit in Rockford, IL, 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM - Details here
Fri, June 14th	ESCONI Junior Meeting, 7:00 PM College of Dupage - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: "Maps"
Fri, June 14th	ESCONI General Meeting, 8:00 PM College of Dupage - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: "Diamond Mine Disaster" by Michele Micetich of the Carbon Hill School Museum in Carbon Hill, IL
	ESCONI Paleontology Study Group Meeting - No meeting in June.  Have a great Summer!  Be ready for Show & Tell in September!

PBS Eons: The History of Climate Cycles (and the Woolly Rhino) Explained

 

PBS Eons has a great video about climate cycles and what caused ebb and flow of the ice ages.  Milankovitch cycles are front and center, with good explanation of how we are affecting the climate today.

Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global climate. So what caused the climate -- and the range of the woolly rhino -- to cycle back and forth between such extremes?