Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

100 million years in amber: Researchers discover oldest fossilized slime mold #fossils #amber

100 million-year-old amber piece with lizard leg and mycomycete (arrow). Credit: Alexander Schmidt, University of Göttingen and Scientific Reports

Phys.org has a story about some very old slime.  Many fossils have been found amber, including dinosaur tail feathers a few years ago.  This time it's some very old fungi.  In this case, a mycomycete and it's next to a piece of lizard leg.  This is the oldest slime mold every found... they are extremely rare in the fossil record.  All the details can be found in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Most people associate the idea of creatures trapped in amber with insects or spiders, which are preserved lifelike in fossil tree resin. An international research team of palaeontologists and biologists from the Universities of Göttingen and Helsinki, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York has now discovered the oldest slime mould identified to date. The fossil is about 100 million years old and is exquisitely preserved in amber from Myanmar. The results have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Slime moulds, also called myxomycetes, belong to a group known as "Amoebozoa." These are microscopic organisms that live most of the time as single mobile cells hidden in the soil or in rotting wood, where they eat bacteria. However, they can join together to form complex, beautiful and delicate fruiting bodies, which serve to make and spread spores.

Since fossil slime moulds are extremely rare, studying their evolutionary history has been very difficult. So far, there have only been two confirmed reports of fossils of fruiting bodies and these are just 35 to 40 million years old. The discovery of fossil myxomycetes is very unlikely because their fruiting bodies are extremely short-lived. The researchers are therefore astounded by the chain of events that must have led to the preservation of this newly identified fossil.

Meteorite Grains Are the Oldest Known Solid Material on Earth #meteorite @FieldMuseum

A chunk of the Murchison meteorite at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. (Basilicofresco via Wikicommons under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Smithsonian Magazine has an article about some very old dust.  Even if you haven't cleaned lately, it's highly doubtful the dust around your home is as old as the dust described in a recent paper published in the journal PNAS.  The lead author is a curator of meteorites at the Field Museum in Chicago, which has a large collection of meteorites.  The meteorite analyzed in this study is the famous Murchison meteorite.

A little more than 50 years ago, on September 28, 1969, a meteorite crashed near the rural village of Murchison in Victoria, Australia. Witnesses saw a fireball streak through the sky and break into three pieces just before 11 a.m. local time, followed by an audible tremor in the area. Locals came upon several fragments of the meteorite, the largest of which, with a mass of 680 grams, crashed through a roof and landed in a pile of hay. All together, some 100 kilograms of the Murchison meteorite were recovered and sent to scientific institutions around the world.

“The Murchison meteorite is a wonderful resource for the scientific community,” says Philipp Heck, a curator of meteorites at the Field Museum in Chicago, which houses a large portion of the extraterrestrial object. “It contains some of the oldest condensates in the solar system and also presolar materials.”

Some of those presolar materials—microscopic grains that formed before the sun, measuring about 2 to 30 micrometers across—have been dated at 4.6 to 4.9 billion years old. And one of the grains analyzed in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is estimated to be roughly 7 billion years old, making it the oldest known material on Earth.

“The oldest one is about 3 billion years older than the sun, [which] makes it about 7 [or 7.5] billion years old,” says Heck, the lead author of the study. The sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago, and Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago.

World Atlas: What Is The Difference Between Paleontology And Archeology? #paleontology #archeology

Paleontologists dig at dinosaur bones.

Check out this article in the World Atlas.  I hear this all the time when I mention fossil hunting... quite often they say something like "I love archeology" or "When did you get interested in archeology" or even "Where do archeologists find dinosaur bones?"  Hopefully, this will clear up the concepts, paleontologists study dinosaurs and most other fossils like trilobites.  It's basically the study of ancient life before the Holocene.  Archeology is the study of human artifacts and remains, going back to about 3.3 million years ago.

Paleontology and archaeology are two closely related scientific fields of study. Despite having several similarities, they have different and distinct goals. A Paleontologist studies fossils while an archaeologist studies human artifacts and its remains.

The fossils studied by paleontologists and archeologists include bones, shells, body imprints, wood, and many others. The paleontologist studies these items to try to understand the forms of life that existed on Earth thousands or millions of years ago. An archaeologist studies the same items to try to understand human life and history.

Scientists Argue a 'Corpse Signal' Will Be Left in The Fossil Record of Our Time #fossils #deeptime

(MR.SUTIN YUUKRUNG/Getty Images)

Science Alert has an interesting story about whether humans will leave a signature in the fossil record.  We have had a huge impact on the current direction of life on Earth, but will any of that impact be preserved in the fossil record... that is subject to much debate.

Today, the vast majority of scientists agree that humans are causing unprecedented changes to our planet. Yet whether that warrants delineating an entirely new epoch is something geologists continue to disagree on.

Some think the impact of humans is now so great, it exceeds the natural processes of the Holocene, while others argue there's no clear marker in the geological record of the age of humans - the so-called Anthropocene.

Palaeontologists Roy Plotnick and Karen Koy fall in the former category, and they think our fossil record is a dead give-away. In a new paper, the pair argue that in the far future - say, a hundred thousand years from now - fossils of our age will point unmistakably towards humans.

Rather morbidly, they call it the "corpse signal", and it's entirely our fault. Since humans have been on this Earth, the total biomass of wild mammals has fallen by as much as 65 percent; at the same time, the overall biomass of mammals has quadrupled.

The main reason for this tip of the scales is a huge and continuous growth in livestock and humans. This suggests that today, cows, pigs and chickens are far more likely to become "potential fossils".

PBS Eons: That Time the Mediterranean Sea Disappeared #paleontology #geology

 

PBS Eons has a new episode.  This one combines paleontology and geology to discuss the history of the Mediterranean Sea.

How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just...disappear? It would take decades and more than 1,000 research studies to even start to figure out the cause -- or causes -- of one of the greatest vanishing acts in Earth’s history.

 

ESCONI Flashback Friday #35: Dresden Lakes Field Trip June 1976 #MazonCreek

As part of the celebration of ESCONI's 70th Anniversary, here is Flashback Friday post #35.  If you have pictures or stories to contribute, please send them over to [email protected].  Thanks!

-----------------------------

Here are pictures from a field trip to Dresden Lakes in 1976.  Dresden Lakes is known for larger concretions with detailed fossils in dark colors, grays and blacks.  The ground is clear with not much vegetation, so concretions should have been easy to find.  Just imagine crawling around on those hills picking up some awesome possibilities...

In Upstate New York, Ancient Arthropods Can Get Turned Into (Fool’s) Gold #trilobites #fossils

A Triarthus, preserved with the arm of the shrimp-like predator Anomalocaris. MARKUS MARTIN

Atlas Obscura has a piece about trilobites... golden trilobites.  Trilobites are some of the most desirable fossils and highly detailed, pyritized trilobites are especially desirable.  "Beecher's Bed" is a famous trilobite quarry discovered and named for Charles Emerson Beecher, a paleontologist a the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.  It is made of good old Ordovician shale and loaded with stunning trilobite specimens, all preserved in golden pyrite.  First excavated in 1893, it was lost in 1904 after Beecher's untimely death, because he never recorded the location.  It was found again in 1982.  Markus Martin took over the site in 2009.

Unlike most prospectors who seek their fortune in gold, Markus Martin got lucky on his very first try. He’d come to a desolate patch of forest in upstate New York in hot pursuit of trilobites. It was the early 2000s and Martin’s day job was in finance, but he was far more interested in the treasures of another era: the Ordovician, from 485 to 444 million years ago, when trilobites roamed the sea that covered most of what is now North America. But Martin wasn’t looking for more ordinary trilobite fossils in muddy brown and dull black rocks. He was looking for glittering ones, whose soft tissues had been filled in perfectly with pyrite, the mineral commonly known as fool’s gold.

Martin was no fool. He knew the fossil beds in the area had a reputation for holding these brilliantly preserved arthropods, and he’d spent the hostile New York winter reading up to ascertain the best place to start looking. Martin scoured Microsoft’s TerraServer (this was a world before Google Maps) and picked a hill in an area riddled with slivers of canyons running 200 feet down into the shale, just three miles off a road and close to where he lived in Oneida County. Martin got permission from the landowner to search the area, and as soon as it was warm enough, he drove up with a backpack and a hammer. “I expected this was going nowhere, and that on Monday I’d go back to work with not much to say,” he says. But when he reached the base of the hill, he saw tiny, glittering trilobites sprinkling the forest floor, like flecks of gold in a river. “To say I was surprised is an understatement,” he says. Martin picked up as many as he could carry, around 30 specimens, piled them into his backpack, and lugged it all home.

800,000 Years Ago, a Meteor Slammed Into Earth. Scientists Just Found the Crater #meteor #geology

An ancient impact scattered bits of glassy debris from Asia to Antarctica, but the resulting crater has long eluded detection. (Image: © Shutterstock)

LiveScience has a story about a century long search to find a meteor crater.  About 790,000 years ago, a meteor hit the Earth and spread tektites, shiny black lumps of rock, over about 10% of the surface of the planet.  The tektites were found from Indonesia to eastern Antarctica and from the Indian Ocean to the western Pacific Ocean.  Now, scientists from the Jackson School Museum of Earth History at the University of Texas have published a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which, they claim to have found the crater.

Geochemical analysis and local gravity readings told researchers that the crater lay in southern Laos on the Bolaven Plateau; the ancient impact was concealed under a field of cooled volcanic lava spanning nearly 2,000 square miles (5,000 square kilometers), the scientists reported in a new study. 

When a meteor hits Earth, terrestrial rocks at the impact site can liquefy from the intense heat and then cool into glassy tektites, according to the Jackson School Museum of Earth History at The University of Texas. Scientists can look at the abundance and locations of tektites to help locate an impact, even if the original crater is eroded or concealed, the study authors wrote.

In this case, there were plenty of tektites — so where was the crater? 

The force of the impact is thought to have created a rim measuring more than 300 feet (100 meters) tall, according to the study. Tektites from the impact were at their biggest and most abundant in the eastern part of central Indochina, but because the tektites were so widespread, previous estimates of the crater's size ranged from 9 miles (15 km) in diameter to 186 miles (300 km), and the feature's precise position remained uncertain even though scientists spent decades searching.

Reminder: ESCONI January 2020 General Meeting Michelle Wenz - "Earth's Inner Workings Revealed through Mineral Inclusions in Diamond" on January 10, 2020 #gems #diamonds

Electron microscope images of diamonds from the Juína area of Brazil.Credit...Suzette Timmerman

The speaker at our January 10, 2020 meeting will be Michelle Wenz, a PhD student from Northwestern University. The title of her talk is "Earth's Inner Workings Revealed through Mineral Inclusions in Diamond". She is working on an suite of superdeep diamonds from Juina, Brazil, many of which appear to have come from the 400-700 km depth range. Her research focus is on water, and deep-mantle water cycling. She developed a method using synchrotron radiation (X-rays) from the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne to image tomographically the location of inclusions inside the diamonds for single-crystal X-ray diffraction, also using the synchrotron X-rays (many of the inclusions are less than 10 micrometers in size, requiring the brilliant X-ray source of the APS). She also recently co-discovered a new rare earth perovskite mineral, which was named goldschmidtite, KNbO3, also found as inclusion in diamond.

ESCONI January 2020 Junior Meeting - Does your child like earth science books? on January 10, 2020 #earthscience

Does your child like earth science books?

Bring them to our next junior meeting and we will use picture books to identify rocks & minerals! Ages 6 to 17 are welcome.

Friday January 10, 2020 at 7pm

College of DuPage

Technical Education Center West side room 1038A

Contact [email protected] with questions

Go to www.ESCONI.org for the map.

Happy Perihelion Day 2020! Earth Is Closest to the Sun Today

An illustration of perihelion and aphelion in the Earth's orbit around the sun, as well as the moon's apogee and perigee in its orbit around planet Earth.  (Image credit: NASA)

Today is Perihelion Day!  We are at our closest approach to the sun... checkout all the details over on Space.com.  Unfortunately, we are still in Winter, but the days have been getting longer since the Winter Solstice.  It won't be long before spring is here and we'll all be out collecting fossils again!

At the time of perihelion, Earth is about 91,398,199 miles (147,091,144 kilometers) away from the sun. On average, Earth's distance from the sun is 92,955,807 miles (149,597,870 km). When our planet reaches aphelion in July, it will be 94,507,635 miles (152,095,295 km) away. 

Earth doesn't feel warmer for the Northern Hemisphere when perihelion occurs. That's because the ellipse in which our planet orbits is not extreme, but almost circular. The cause of seasonal changes is the tilt in the planet's axis. Perihelion and aphelion don't cause the seasons, but they do affect the length of the seasons. 

Rescheduled Warehouse Work Day Due to Weather - Saturday, January 25th, 2020, 9:00 - 1:00ish

If you have some time, come join our work day at the warehouse on Saturday, January 25th, 2020 from 9:00-1:00ish.  If the weather is bad, we will choose a different day and let everyone know.  The warehouse address is 900 Knell in Montgomery, IL.  Please meet/enter in the back of the warehouse ONLY.  You will see railroad tracks along the back of the warehouse.  Drive all the way to the end in the back.
 
For more information, contact us at [email protected]

 

Teenage T. Rex Fossils Reveal Haphazard Growth Spurts

An artist's illustration of juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, which were more fleet-footed than their adult counterparts (Julius T. Csotonyi)

Smithsonian Magazine has an article about teenage T. rex fossils.  The article discusses a recent paper that appeared in Science Advances.  That paper readdresses the two sleek, and slender tyrannosaurs, nicknamed Jane and Petey, at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Illinois and concludes that the two specimens are juvenile T. rexes, not Nanotyrannus as was previously published.

Maxing out around 40 feet in length and up to 9 tons in weight, adult T. rex were a force to be reckoned with. But the most well-studied T. rex fossils have also been the biggest—adults that had wrapped up most of the growing process in their early twenties, study author Holly Woodward, a paleontologist at Oklahoma State University, says in a statement. As such, exactly how these infamous behemoths—which likely entered the world as pigeon-sized hatchlings—attained these staggering sizes has long been mysterious.

So Woodward and her team decided to re-analyze two dinosaur specimens housed at Illinois’s Burpee Museum of Natural History. The pair, nicknamed Jane and Petey, are sleek, slender, and around 20 feet in length, bearing some resemblance to T. rex, but middling in size. As such, while most researchers believe Jane and Petey are probably T. rex teens, others have previously contended they were adult members of another species entirely—a diminutive dinosaur called Nanotyrannus.

But when the researchers analyzed microstructures in the specimens’ leg bones, they discovered that both Jane and Petey almost certainly juveniles at the time of their death. The fibers in their bones were haphazard, and teemed with ancient traces of blood vessels—signs that the dinosaurian duo were in the midst of rapid growth.

ESCONI Flashback Friday #34: Pictures From a Fossil Field Trip To Indiana May 4-5, 1957

As part of the celebration of ESCONI's 70th Anniversary, here is Flashback Friday post #34.  If you have pictures or stories to contribute, please send them over to [email protected].  Thanks!

-----------------------------

Here are some pictures from a field trip to a few localities in Indiana May 4-5, 1957.  No hard hats and check out those clothes!

Indiana Paleontology trip - Allaway, M.Balbitt, H.Bonow

Stoney Creek Motel in Bloomington briefing for Madison, Ind

Highway near Bloomington, Indiana

Bloomington-Nashville road crinoids

Spencer, Indiana Helen Law

Indiana quarry Betty Farr & Mary Fitly

Man Keeps Rock For Years, Hoping It's Gold. It Turned Out to Be Far More Valuable #meteorite

ScienceAlert has a post about a valuable find in Australia.  It seems that David Hole found a rock he hoped would be gold.  It wasn't, but as it turns out it was more valuable than gold!

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.

Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.

He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock - after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.

To crack open his find, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even putting the thing in acid, but not even a sledgehammer could make a crack. That's because what he was trying so hard to open was no gold nugget. As he found out years later, it was a rare meteorite.

"It had this sculpted, dimpled look to it," Melbourne museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald.

"That's formed when they come through the atmosphere, they are melting on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them."

Unable to open the 'rock', but still intrigued, Hole took the meteorite into the Melbourne Museum to be identified.

"I've looked at a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites," Henry told 10 daily.

In fact, after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, Henry explains only two of the offerings have ever turned out to be real meteorites.

This was one of the two.

ESCONI Events January 2020

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

Fri, Jan 10th	ESCONI Junior Meeting, 7:00 PM College of Dupage - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038A (Map) - Topic: "Does your child like earth science books?"
Fri, Jan 10th	ESCONI General Meeting, 8:00 PM College of Dupage - Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038A (Map) - Topic: "Earth's Inner Workings Revealed through Mineral Inclusions in Diamond" by Michelle Wenz, Researcher at Northwestern University
Sat, Jan 18th	ESCONI Paleontology Study Group Meeting, 7:30 PM -Tech Ed (TEC) Building, Room 1038B (Map) - Topic: "Middle Cambrian Fossils of Utah" by ESCONI Member Chris Cozart
Sat, Jan 25th	Warehouse Work Day, 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM - see here for details.  Rescheduled due to weather!

LiveScience: The 100 Best Science Photos of 2019 #science #photography

(Image credit: ZooKeys)

Live Science has an interesting post, which includes 100 awesome science photos from 2019.  Check it out... a great way to relax on New Years Day!  Happy New Year from us at ESCONI!

About 99 million years ago, a Cretaceous millipede scampered over the forest floor in what is now Southeast Asia, avoiding being squished by neighboring dinosaurs. But the millipede, now called Burmanopetalum inexpectatum, did stumble into a sticky patch of sap, said researchers who found the tiny corpse entombed in the hardened form of that sap called amber.