Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

Quanta: A Rapid End Strikes the Dinosaur Extinction Debate #dinosaurs #extinction

Quanta Magazine has an interesting piece about the extinction of the dinosaurs.  The article is an interview with Yale Paleontologist Pincelli Hull.  Her principle sub-field of study is marine plankton fossils.  In the interview, she discusses some new evidence that the full blame for the K-T extinction lies with the asteroid that struck the Yucatan peninsula about 66 million years ago.  This new evidence comes from ocean cores and tracks temperature changes before and after the K-T boundary.

The last time the world was ending, two cataclysms aligned. On one side of the planet, a wayward asteroid dropped like a cartoon anvil, punching through the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula and penetrating deep into Earth’s crust. Around the same time — 66 million years ago — a million cubic kilometers of lava were in the process of bubbling up to the surface, releasing climate-altering carbon dioxide and sulfur into the atmosphere and forming what would become the Deccan Traps of modern-day India.

Rock layers around the world show what happened next. No dinosaurs besides the birds made it out. Neither did the squidlike ammonites that curled like rams’ horns, or marine reptiles including the plesiosaurs (Loch Ness conspiracies notwithstanding). But because of the close timing of the asteroid and the volcanism, geologists have spent years staking out increasingly acrimonious positions on which one deserves the blame for the ensuing carnage. In 2018, The Atlantic called the debate “The Nastiest Feud in Science.”

Until recently, Pincelli Hull kept out of the fray. In her subfield, marine plankton fossils, the impact was considered the obvious sole cause of what’s called the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. Instead, she focused on understanding how life bounced back, not on what had almost snuffed it out. “There was a lot to be done without really ruffling any feathers,” said Hull, a paleontologist at Yale University.

Final Museum Madness voting for your Field Museum Favorite! @FieldMuseum

The final for the Field Museum Madness bracket is set,  It's SUE vs the Fighting African Elephants!  Who will win?  Vote here by Monday, April 13th at 11:00 PM CDT.

Game on! The top two Field Favorites have come down to SUE and the Fighting African Elephants. Both iconic members of our collection would love to see you when we reopen.

The final winner will be announced in our regular Tuesday Field Museum email.

 

Fossil Friday #1: Silurian Nautiloids from the Chicago Area #fossils #FossilFriday

This is the "Fossil Friday" post #1.  Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website.  We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected].  Please include a short description or story.  Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world!

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

These are Silurian nautiloids from the Chicago area. During the Silurian Chicago was a vast ocean reef.  Besides these remarkable nautiloids, you can find trilobites (30+ species), crinoids, and many other types of fossil animal.  The fossils below were submitted by long time ESCONI member John Catalani, who leads the Paleontology Study Group and is also instrumental in setting up some of our great field trips.

Bickmorites marshi

Cumingsoceras elrodi from Lemont, IL

Dawsonoceras sp. from Lemont, IL

Mandaloceras sp. from Romeoville, IL

Throwback Thursday #2: Diamond in the Rough

The following poem appeared in the June 1952 edition of the "The Earth Science News".   It was written by Cullen K. Paddick, age 14.  Come on out and get involved in ESCONI.  Your efforts will always be appreciated!  We can always use some helping hands!

Diamond in the Rough

A diamond in the rough
Is a diamond sure enough
For before it ever sparkles
It has the diamond stuff.

Of course someone must find it,
Or it never would be found.
And then someone must grind it,
Or it never wound be ground.

But when it's found and when it's ground,
And when it's burnished bright
That diamond's everlasting -
Just sending out its light.

Oh, Leader of ESCONI
Don't say "I've done enough",
The newest in your club may be,
A diamond in the rough.

- Cullen K. Paddick, age 14

 

Four New Species of Prehistoric Flying Reptiles Unearthed in Morocco #pterosaurs

This illustration is an artist's interpretation of what a toothed pterosaur may have looked like 100 million years ago. (University of Portsmouth)

This illustration represents an artist's interpretation of what a toothless pterosaurs would have looked like 100 million years ago. (University of Portsmouth)

Smithsonian Magazine has an article about the recent discovery of not 1. not 2, but 4 new species of pterosaur.  These animals were found in the famous Kem Kem fossil beds in southeastern Morocco.  They lived about 100 million years ago during the middle Cretaceous Period.  All the details are in a paper published in the journal Cretaceous Research.

These leathery-winged predators, part of an extinct group known as pterosaurs, were excavated from the Kem Kem fossil beds in southeastern Morocco. Three new species of toothed pterosaur, all part of the Ornithocheiridae family, identified from chunks of jaws studded with pointed teeth, were first reported last month in the journal Cretaceous Research. A fourth pterosaur, Afrotapejara zouhrii, which had no teeth, is the first of its kind found on African soil, identified by part of its skull, according to a University of Portsmouth statement.

“These new finds provide an important window into the world of African pterosaurs,” Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist from the University of Detroit Mercy, says in a statement. “We know so much more about pterosaurs from places like Europe and Asia, so describing new specimens from Africa is always very exciting.”

Researchers hypothesize these soaring hunters had 13-feet-wide wingspans, and snatched fish with their sharp teeth, forming part of an ancient river ecosystem that included crocodiles, turtles and predatory dinosaurs. The fourth species, Afrotapejara zouhrii, would have been similar in size, but toothless with a large crest on the front of its skull.

None of these pterosaurs would have weighed much despite their size. Like modern birds, their bones were thin and hollow, allowing the flying reptiles to reach large sizes without becoming too heavy to take off. But this flight adaptation makes pterosaur skeletons less likely to fossilize intact, leaving them scarce in the fossil record.

The three chunks of jaw bone from the toothed pterosaurs resemble existing specimens found in Brazil and England, leading researchers to tentatively place them in the genera Anhanguera, Ornithocheirus and Coloborhynchus, respectively.

Trilobite Tuesday #2: AMNH Trilobite Top Tens #trilobite #fossils #TrilobiteTuesday

Asaphiscus wheeleri: Another of the “classic” and omnipresent Cambrian species from Utah.

The American Museum of Natural History has an interesting page titled "Trilobite Top Tens".  They have everything from Charles Walcott (NY Wolcott-Rust quarry and Burgess Shale), to Elrathia kingii (one of the most common trilobites), to Sir Roderick Murchison (rock star geologist from the 1800s).

The categories are:

• Top 10 Trilobite Museums
• Top 10 Figures In Trilobite History
• 10 Most Common Trilobites In The World
• 10 Rarest Trilobites In The World
• 10 Most Beautiful Trilobites In The World

The AMNH has a great website on trilobites.  There is so much information... check it out!

 

Mazon Monday #2: The Vanishing Mother Lode of Mazon Creek #MazonCreek

The Friday, July 2nd, 2004 edition of The Reader featured an article titled "The Vanishing Mother Lode of Mazon Creek".  The full text of the article is available online.  Unfortunately, it doesn't include the pictures.  This article was written by Mike Sula, no relation to long time ESCONI member Rob Sula.  The article does a great job with the history of Mazon Creek fossil collecting.  Many of the colorful characters were interviewed for the piece and some were ESCONI members.  Some even contributed specimens for the animal book "The Mazon Creek Fossil Fauna" by Jack Wittry, written in 2012.  

In the spring of last year Tom Testa made the painful decision to sell off a piece of his legacy--a 300-million-year-old fossilized chiton called Glaphurochiton concinnus, an oblong mollusk whose modern relatives graze on algae that cling to wave-swept rocky shores. Back then, in the middle Pennsylvanian period, Testa's chiton crept along the muddy floor of a shallow inland sea whose long northern coastline arced through what is now Kankakee, Will, and Grundy counties, about 50 miles southwest of the Loop.

Testa has several dozen chitons in his enormous fossil collection, most plucked from piles of discarded shale at a former strip mine near Braidwood. The mine was called Pit 11, and it's the most important of a group of fossil sites in the area, collectively known as Mazon Creek after the tributary of the Illinois River where the fossils were first discovered in the mid-19th century. Mazon Creek fossils are unique. They're well preserved and unusually diverse, and many have few relatives in the world fossil record. There are mollusks, plants, arthropods, fish, amphibians, and lots of weird soft-bodied invertebrates, which are especially important because the fragile creatures had no hard parts and therefore didn't fossilize easily.

More than 300 animal species and 200 plants have been identified from the Mazon Creek area, evidence that in the Pennsylvanian period northeastern Illinois teemed with life. Mazon Creek is known as one of the world's finest Lagerstatten--which, loosely translated from German, means "mother lode" and is used to describe a fossil fauna so well preserved and diverse it tells a nearly complete tale of what life was like when the creatures were alive. In his 1989 book Wonderful Life Stephen Jay Gould called Mazon Creek one of the three greatest LagerstŠtten of the Paleozoic era, the 345-million-year geologic period that begins with the first explosion of multicellular life and ends with a mass extinction just before the rise of the dinosaurs.

LiveScience: 'Warrior' dinosaur with nasty gouge mark on claw uncovered in New Mexico #dinosaurs

LiveScience has a story about a new species of carnivorous dinosaur.  This new animal is called Dineobellator notohesperus and is a cousin to Velociraptors.  It lived about 70 million years ago in what is now New Mexico.  This particular specimen has a couple injuries, a nasty rib injury and a gash on its sickle-shaped claw, both of which show signs of healing.  Read all about it in paper in the journal Scientific Reports.

The dinosaur's fossils were discovered in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico during the summer of 2008. Given the dinosaur's impressive injuries, the scientists named it Dineobellator notohesperus (pronounced "dih NAY oh - BELL a tor" "Noh toh - hes per us"), by combining the Navajo word "Diné" (Navajo people) with the Latin word "bellator" (warrior). Its species name comes from "noto" and "hesper,"  the Greek words for "south" and "west," respectively, in reference to the American Southwest. 

D. notohesperus belongs to the dromaeosaurid family, a group of small to medium-size feathered carnivores, including Velociraptor, that lived during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 65 million years ago). After analyzing the bones, paleontologists determined that D. notohesperus would have measured about 6.5 feet (2 meters) long, about 3 feet (1 m) tall at the hip and weighed about 40-50 lbs. (18-22 kilograms), making it about as heavy as a female poodle. Remarkably, features on its forearm revealed that D. notohesperus is "one of the rare dinosaurs from North America that shows evidence of feathers," Jasinski said. 

Field Museum Special Event: Meet a Scientist Thursday, April 9 | 3:30-4:30pm @FieldMuseum @SUETheTrex #dinosaurs

Founders' Council Special Event:
Meet a Scientist

Thursday, April 9 | 3:30-4:30pm

We hope this invitation finds you, your family, and friends safe. As a Founders' Council donor, we are offering you this special opportunity.
 

Join us for our inaugural Meet a Scientist virtual event featuring McCarter Collections Manager of Fossil Vertebrates, Bill Simpson. Bill will share his extraordinary involvement with SUE over the years.

SUE's journey with the Field Museum begins in the summer of 1997 at Sotheby's warehouse in New York. It continues with the remounting of the dinosaur and eventual display in the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet.

We encourage you to invite your friends and submit their emails when you register. You can also forward this invitation to them. 

So we can make the necessary arrangements, we ask you to please register by Tuesday, April 7 at noon.

LiveScience: Remains of 90 million-year-old rainforest discovered under Antarctic ice #fossils #Antarctica

An illustration of the temperate rainforest that thrived in West Antarctica about 90 million years ago, when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

(Image: © J. McKay/Alfred-Wegener-Institut; Creative Commons licence CC-BY 4.0)

LiveScience has a story about a fossil rainforest under the ice in Antarctica.  This forest was found in West Antarctica and dates to about 90 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period.  The fossils show a tropical climate similar to New Zealand.  Read all about it in a paper in the April 1st, 2020 edition of the journal Nature.

The rainforest's remains were discovered under the ice in a sediment core that a team of international researchers collected from a seabed near Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica in 2017. 

As soon as the team saw the core, they knew they had something unusual. The layer that had formed about 90 million years ago was a different color. "It clearly differed from the layers above it," study lead researcher Johann Klages, a geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, said in a statement.

Back at the lab, the team put the core into a CT (computed tomography) scanner. The resulting digital image showed a dense network of roots throughout the entire soil layer. The dirt also revealed ancient pollen, spores and the remnants of flowering plants from the Cretaceous period.

By analyzing the pollen and spores, study co-researcher Ulrich Salzmann, a paleoecologist at Northumbria University in England, was able to reconstruct West Antarctica's 90 million-year-old vegetation and climate. "The numerous plant remains indicate that the coast of West Antarctica was, back then, a dense temperate, swampy forest, similar to the forests found in New Zealand today," Salzmann said in the statement.

Throwback Thursday #1: "If I Could Turn Back Time: ESCONI Rock Club" by Mary Fairchild #MazonCreek #fossils

Mary Fairchild wrote this article back in 2006.  Her and her family were heavily involved in ESCONI in the late 1990s and 2000s.  Actually, Jim served as president of ESCONI from 2006 to 2008, along with various other positions.  He currently serves as auctioneer at the annual ESCONI shows.  As you will read, they have a deep appreciation of Mazon Creek fossils and the many people that have collected and contributed to the research over the years.  This article relates some of their many experiences while members of ESCONI.

Mary has a blog at mfairlady.com, which has a bunch of interesting posts... some of which are even related to ESCONI!  This article was originally posted here.

If I Could Turn Back Time: ESCONI Rock Club

The Mazon Creek flora is renowned for being almost completely collected by amateurs.  Since 1858, in an area covering approximately 100 square miles, untold numbers of collectors have gathered fossils in quantities unprecedented in North America.”  Jack Wittry

In the mid-1990s when our family first became interested in collecting fossils our  electric bill promoted the location of a collecting area right at the Braidwood nuclear power plant.  Later, we would learn that this was the famous Mazon Creek collecting area.  The area, which had once been the Peabody Coal Pit 11 was now a cooling pond for the Braidwood nuclear power plant. This area is also the location of the Illinois State Fossil, a strange wormlike “Tully monster” named after its collector, Francis Tully.

We gathered up our family, backpacks and bikes and headed out to the area where we met a boater who told us about the Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois (ESCONI) when we asked where to look for fossils in the area.  ESCONI was a great way to meet with others who share our interests.  Members since 1996, our family has been active in ESCONI for over a decade now.  Our family was interviewed for an article in the local paper:  “Fossil Hunters Dig the Past in Illinois or Out West, Suburban Residents Seek Bits of History”– Red Orbit

During our first year we attended the Mid America Paleontology Society( MAPS) show and continued on with various events with ESCONI which included field trips to Ontario Canada ,  St. Paul, Indiana, Ohio for trilobites, Kentucky for flourite, and Missouri for barite to name a few.

We had the great opportunity to become friends with the late members Don Auler and Andy Hay.  Don Auler, known in the rock hound community with his wife Dorothy for donating much time and effort to further the earth sciences, would illustrate books and personally teach our children how to watercolor paint.  Andy would go on to illustrate the Richardson’s Guide to Mazon Creek with Dr. Charles Shabica .

The Richardson’s Guide was dedicated to the late Field Museum paleontologist Eugene Richardson who founded the Mazon Creek Project  in the 1960s.It was a program sponsored by Northeastern Illinois University whose main goal was to keep the Mazonia-Braidwood Conservation Area open for collecting by scientists, school children, scout groups, visitors from other states and others.  It was also an attempt to encourage more communication between paleontologists and amateur collectors.

The ESCONI general meeting is the second Friday of each month at 8pm at the College of Dupage and the annual show is held in March.

PBS Eons: How Dogs (Eventually) Became Our Best Friends #paleontology #dogs

 

PBS Eons has a new episode.  This one is about mans' best friend... the dog!

We’re still figuring out the details, but most scientists agree that it took thousands of years of interactions to develop our deep bond with dogs. When did they first become domesticated? Where did this happen? And what did the process look like, in terms of genetics and anatomy?