By
Jason Carr on April 18th, 2010
Thank you to everyone who came out today to help get the museum ready for the 62nd annual meeting of the Geological Society of America—Rocky Mountain Section held this year in Rapid City.
The cases were cleaned and several displays were updated. Check out some pictures from the event.
By
Benjamin Zalneraitis on February 20th, 2010
Dinosaur had ginger feathers
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By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News
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Meet Sinosauropteryx, a very spiky little dinosaur.
A team of scientists from China and the UK has now revealed that the bristles of this 125-million-year-old dinosaur were in fact ginger-coloured feathers.
The researchers say that the diminutive carnivore had a “Mohican” of feathers running along its head and back. It also had a striped tail.
The team revealed details of the dinosaur’s coloured feathers in an article published on Nature’s website.
Excerpt from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8481448.stm
Quotes and info obtained from article.
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An article published on Nature’s website has claimed that they have determined the color of the dinosaur Sinosauropteryx. As in the picture above, the article claims that the dinosaur possessed rusty red feathers. The authors used melanosomes in the feathers to determine this. “A ginger-haired person would have more spherical melanosomes,” said Professor Mike Benton from the University of Bristol, UK, who led this study. “[A] black-haired or grey-haired person would have more of the sausage-shaped structures.”
I’ve heard a few arguments about the ability to determine the color of a long-dead animal, and thought this (and the forum) would be a good place for the discussion of this. I am tentatively leaning towards the color argument, but this is purely dependent on how accurate the studies on the relationship melanosomes and colors. Don’t forget to visit the forum for further discussion.
By
Jason Carr on July 29th, 2009
It’s raining here in Sundance WY. The Litle Houston Quarry is soaked and no work can be done today. But this provides an excellent oppertunity to post some pictures.
By
Jason Carr on July 25th, 2009
Week one of paleo field camp at the Little Houston Quarry in Sundance Wyoming has conlcluded. The quarry has been reopened after 10 years, and we spent the majority of the week mapping out the bone bed. (getting the contextual data—where the fossil was found is just as important removing as the bone itself.)
On Friday we made a trip to Devil’s Tower National Monument, a volcanic neck that played a role in Stephen Speilberg’s sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
We’re all excited about next week, when we hope to be able to remove a large sauropod femur.
photos are on the Museum of Geology’s facebook page here
By
Jason Carr on April 29th, 2009
In 1912 author Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the novel The Lost World about a hidden valley in South America where Dinosaurs still thrived. That book and it’s successors have spurred the imaginations of many a budding paleontologist. While the idea of Dinosaurs surviving into the present is quite impossible—some may have survived the extinction that supposedly wiped them out 65 million years ago.
A hadrosaur assemblage—found in the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the San Juan Basin straddling Colorado and New Mexico—suggests that perhaps an enclave of Dinosaurs survived into the Cenozoic.
Naashoibitosaurus
Initally it was thought that the fossil hadrosaur had been reworked—eroded form older sediment and redeposited in the Ojo Alamo, and that the lack of weathering to the specimen was due to a quick re-deposition near its initial burial site, or that the site was actually below the K-T boundary. But in a new study pubished in the online journal Paleontolgia Electronica, USGS emeritus scientist Jim Fassett analyzes the geochemistry of the bones, along with paleomagnetic, paleobotanical and palynological data—and concludes that they were indeed initially deposited in the Paleocene.
The dinosaurs were not wiped out in a wall of fire from a meteor's impact—as depicted here
Again—this is an assemblage of bones from a single individual of a single species, it doesn’t imply large herds of hadrosaurs roaming accross the American Southwest in the Paleocene, or neccsessitate that other dinos must have survived also. But if this analysis is correct, a small breeding population of hadrosaurs must have survived into the Cenozoic—at least for a little while.
The impact event at chixalub would not have instantly vaporized the Dinosaurs as is widely believed. Globally the impact would have sent up a large cloud of debris and CO2 from the carbonate rocks the asteroid impacted into. This would have dramatically altered climate and disrupted the Dinosaurs’ habitat—leading to their eventual extinction. So finding some holdouts, even close to the impact site is not unexpected. Also remember, just because they were there 1 million years after the impact doesn’t mean that they survuved the impact at that site. The hadrosaurs found could have established their Paleocene refuge well after the impact and ensuing chaos died down.
Emeritus USGS paleontologist Jim Fassett has published his findings in the April issue of the online journal Paleontolgia Electronica.
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