Big Event on T.V. Last Night

Ah, the Super Bowl, a big night  of football, wings, beer, and…commercials.  I, like many other people, spend a large portion of Super Bowl Sunday critiquing the commercials aired (Side Note: I dislike that NFL ad where they superimpose different teams on classic t.v. characters because the Baltimore Ravens were not featured…..screw you NFL). Near the end of the game the commercials started lacking until this came along……

THATS RIGHT! there is a new dinosaur based sci-fi show coming to fox! 

The premise seems to be a mix of Land of the Lost and Primeval (if you have not seen primeval, check it out on BBC, its pretty good).  The only difference is that the people are from the future and are going back in time to gather resources since we ruined the planet.  Yeah the plot seems a tad hackneyed but who cares? theres a dinosaur show coming to American television!!

My one problem with the show is that it is being aired on FOX.  Any sci-fi fan knows that science fiction + FOX = cancelled show. Hopefully this little gem does not get thrown to the dreaded Friday slot like so many cancelled shows (Dollhouse, Firefly, Sarah Connor Chronicles). 

I am hoping the trend of friday sci-fi will be changed now that Fringe is there, but I am not holding my breath.  Chances are, by the end of fall, I will not be happy that two great sci-fi shows will be canned.

Fossil Friday: Belemnites

One of the first trips out into the field with Indiana University included some mapping work on the Black Hills.  The section we mapped spanned from paleozoic rocks up to the Morrison Formation of the  Jurassic.  If you are familiar with the Morrison, you know that it is a famous formation known for an abundance of fossils.  Characterized by mainly red siltstones and sandstones, the Morrison is a great spot to find dinosaur fossils, along with aquatic denizens.

Which brings me to these guys, belemnites.  Many of the remains of belemnites are a cigar shaped calcite guard the animal used to help it maintain buoyancy.  The guard was sort of a counter-balance for the front of the animal.

This is the best specimen I found….you can use my thumb or look at my backpack for scale.

 

While trekking through the field we came across the Morrison, and in this part of the Morrison, we found belemnites, and lots of them!  Many of the specimens were tiny, broken, missing tips, and overall, not that great.  The better samples were still not very big (the largest one I found was around and inch and a half long).  But still, it was quite fun digging through the earth, trying to beat my classmates in a  “who can find the best belemnite” contest.  All in all, I think i left the field that day with two pocket-fulls of belemnites, but since this excursion was still at the very beginning of the course, six weeks later I found myself with a fraction of the samples I had found.

Belemnites are one of my favorite fossils, for some reason whenever I find one, i get far too excited far too fast.

 

P.S. i would post more pictures but my camera is not cooperating, expect more pictures later

 

Fossil Friday: Crinoid Calyx

When I was at field camp this past summer, I was given an assignment to fill out a notebook filled with data on the stratigraphic succession of units in the Tobacco Root Mountains of Montana. During our late Paleozoic section of the course I came upon a very rare and exciting discovery….

Crinoid calyxes!!!

 

Pencil head for scale

 

These beauties were found in the Mississippian age Madison group, specifically, the Lodgepole formation.

The Lodgepole is a great unit to study as well as use for a marker for figuring out where you are stratigraphically. The formation is dominantly limestone with some chert. One of the main indicators of the Lodgepole is that the formation is chock full of fossil hash. From brachiopods shell fragments to crinoid stems, to oolites and oncolites, the Lodgepole is great for finding Mississipian age fossils.

I found these two lovelies while taking a break from unit description and wandered to an unoccupied wall to see if I could find anything of value, and boy did I!

Sadly, while extracting the two from the wall I lost the smaller calyx. But, luckily i did get to save the more preserved, more complete calyx.

I cant be too sure but it seems like the calyx is from a species in the subclass Camerata. Distinguishing features include a bowl shaped cup and fixed brachials incorporated into the cup.  A rough annotation of the cup and brachials can be seen below.

 

 

If anyone else has any ideas (or corrections) as to what the species may be please, feel free to comment.

An Expiriment of Mammoth Proportions

Remember the frozen woolly mammoth found a while back? Remember when they said they were going to attempt to clone it…..and failed?

Well it looks like Japan will be be attempting to clone our frozen friend, successfully, and soon.

Dr. Akira Iritani says that he can have a mammoth clone created by 2016. All he needs is 3 sq. cm piece of tissue from the mammoth, an elephant ova (African elephant that is) and a whole lot of luck.

Why luck you ask? because cloning is only about 30% successful and that’s with modern day animals, not extinct ones.

This takes me back to that scene in Jurassic Park when the characters have a heated argument over the topic of the ethics of cloning extinct animals.  What are your thoughts on the topic? should the mammoth be cloned? and why?

Thanks to io9 for the tip….

They also just posted this article as i was typing up my post.  It focuses on the question of if we should clone extinct animals

New Years New Posts

Once again, I have to apologize. I have been slacking, hard. My last post was over half a year ago! I’d like to blame work, but that doesn’t excuse me from being able to throw a post down once or twice a week.

I figure the best time for me to get back into the blogging groove and get back on track is the New Year. Therefore, at the risk of being cliché, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to post more frequently. Hopefully I can set up a weekly fossil post highlighting a different fossil each week. How does the idea of a Friday fossil sound?

I had promised field camp posts and I will deliver, expect them to be sprinkled throughout the upcoming months. A few will most likely be tied in with Friday fossils.

Here’s to a new year and a new start at fossiliferous weekly!

The Return

Yes, i know it has been a while.  Much time has passed and many readers may have left but for the few that remain i have good news.  I AM BACK FROM FIELD CAMP!!! The 2010 Indiana University Geologic field camp has ended and this blogger has survived.  Expect a bunch of new posts involving the geology of the Tobacco Root Mountains as well as Yellowstone, The Badlands, Bighorn Mountains and Glacier National Park…..Hold on to your butts, it is going to be a wild ride

Columnar Jointing, I Choose You!!

As noted in my “About” page, one of my interests includes video games.  Though it is quite embarassing to mention, one of my favorites has always been the Pokemon series (go ahead laugh, but how could anyone not love the idea of accelerated evolution in different species of animals that fight each other?? i mean come on, if your animal cannot compete what does it do? EVOLVE!) but I digress, the main point of this post is that while playing Pokemon I noticed the artwork for a cave in the game had a very interesting structural feature……

(Nintendo, 2010)

THATS RIGHT! columnar jointing!

Columnar jointing forms when a lava flow cools and the lava contracts and solidifies.  The solid forms nice polygonal shapes (usually hexagonal) with angles of 120 degrees (normally).

But what strikes me as interesting with this jointing is that there is a cave in between the two sets of joints.  Also, the joints are slanted meaning that some metamorphasis had to take place. It spurred me on to think of ways this scenario could have played out.

1) A HUGE lava flow rolls in through the lovely pokemon land (perhaps caused by a fire pokemon?? maybe) the lava cools and forms the joints.  Then, a mountain building event occurs and the joints are then slanted and deformed.  Finally, some sort of crazy erosion occurred where a cave was created in this lava flow, maybe a river.

- the problem with this hypothesis though is that caves are usually formed in limestone and since columnar jointing is an igneous feature then that would nix the                       whole “this is a limestone cave” idea.  Not to mention a river would not cut the columns as beautiful as it did there.

2) Same as before, giant lava flow and metamorphosis, but this time, lets get kinky and have the cave be one giant vesicle.  I mean, if we have a giant lava flow why cant we have giant vesicles?

-the problem here is that the vesicle would probably have been mineralized over time and would have become a giant amygdule…..still a cool thought though

3) This one is my favorite.  Nintendo screwed up and just put columns in the cave to make it look pretty for the gamers.  I agree with the choice of using columns, because they are awesome but next time nintendo, just stick with boulders and such.

If you want to learn more about columnar jointing check out two great blog posts on my friends blogs from our structural geology trip.

http://notnecessarilygeology.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/structural-geology-trip-part-3-limberlost-trail/

http://iapetancaptain.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/limberlost-trail/