Museum Visit

So about a week ago I was in Gainsville, FL home of the University of Florida. While there I took a couple of hours to visit the museum there, the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Let me start by saying that if you ever are in Gainsville it is worth a visit to the museum. It is fairly large, at least for a university museum, and contains a lot of different sections. The section that interests me, being a paleontologist, is the paleontology part. You start walking through a couple of small dioramas of early life but since there aren't much in the way of early fossils from Florida this is all kind of glanced over. You won't find much in the way of dinosaurs here, that is what happens when the state is underwater/doesn't exist for the entirety of the Mesozoic.

Then you walk into the main fossil hall which is quite impressive. Normally when you see fossil specimens in an exhibit hall they are entirely casts of the original bones so they can keep the actual specimens in the back where researchers have access to them. These exhibits here use actual fossils, if you look close at the specimens you will see that the individual elements have ID numbers on them that are given to the fossils when they are first prepared and put in collections. We were told that they sometimes have to go pull out fossils from the exhibits so people can do studying/analysis of them. The exhibit hall is full of specimens that you normally don't see in museums because most people are interested in dinosaurs.

While I was there they had what is called Can you Dig It going on. This is an event that geology department puts on every year apparently where they talk to the little kids about some fun stuff with geology. They had a volcano that they made explode every 30ish minutes and had a table on rocks and minerals. The vert paleo group had a table where they talked about Florida fossils as well as a few other topics. They also gave each kid that game an actual fossil, most likely ones that were either very common or had little significance. There was a little kid there holding her's and she looked ecstatic to just have one it was cute.


The final thing that I went to was the butterfly exhibit. This one of the few things that you have to pay to get into but it is well worth the price to get in. If you haven't ever been to an exhibit like this you are walking through a room that is filled with butterflies that fly all around you and you do have to watch your step. They also have some weaver birds and some other birds in their as well so it is always full of activity. There are plenty of flowers and the butterflies land on you if you stand still so it is enjoyable, and kids will love it.

I didn't have time to see the rest of the exhibits but you can find out more about them here, which shows just how large the museum is. It also appears that there are a lot of activities that the museum puts on, similar to the Can You Dig It activity I mentioned earlier. So if you live in or near the city of Gainsville, FL I recommend going if you get the chance and those of you that might be traveling through the area take a couple of hours to stop by and check out/support the science that goes on in Florida.

This finally brings me to something I blogged about earlier about supporting the push for a new museum for LSU (here). After seeing what used to be the museum that they have a University of Florida getting support allowed them to build a much larger and better museum that attracts all sorts of events. So continue to show your support for LSU to put in a new museum (here).

I plan on blogging about any museum visits that I do from now on, but I guess I should do the one here in Lubbock, the Museum of Texas Tech University, next.

Museum visits page

Private Fossil Collections

Vertebrate fossils are rare for most of the world, while there are of course some places where you can't seem to take a step without tripping over one. So what should be done when a fossil is found. Well if it is on your private land you are free to do what you want with it. This differs from the archaeological system in many states where you are obligated to report archaeological finds. If it is on public land it is by definition owned by the entire public. This is why in order to collect on public land you have to get a permit, which is hard to do if you don't have ties to someone who already has one, in order to collect. These are typically given the museums and individuals who are typically associated with research institutions, typically universities. This doesn't just apply to fossils but everything from animals to just the rocks themselves. For national forests and grasslands you also have to get a permit to log or graze cattle on them, their original purpose.

So what made me blog about this? I am sure that most people are familiar with the creationist museum just outside of Cincinnati, actually on the Kentucky side of the Ohio (see here). Well what many people don't realize is that there are in fact many creationist museums scattered around the country (see here). Once of these is called the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum located in Crosbyton, TX (see here, their official website is here). For those of you who aren't from/don't live in west Texas Crosbyton is only about 30-45 minutes from Lubbock, TX so I am clearly familiar with this museum. Well I didn't realize that they had a blog (here) so I figured I would read some of their posts when I came across it today. While many of his posts are political, very anti-Obama shocker there, some are about what they have found.

Part of one (here):

Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2009, we were collecting in southern Montana, when my digging buddie, Jordan Hall, found the largest hadrosaur footbone I have ever seen. For years we have offered a cast of a hind leg that was reported to be the largest known. It came from South Dakota. This new one looks to be 15% to 20% larger. Also, this Thursday, a long-time digging friend, Linda, sent a huge metatarsal from South Dakota that is the largest I had even seen. It was found this summer. We'll do some measurements and report on them.

Second one (here):

In July, I joined some digging buddies to help Otis Kline of the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum in Glendive, Montana finish the excavation of a large Triceratops. The vertebrae are 20 to 30 % larger than average. But the skull is odd. Based on the left squamosal, the nose horn and one brow horn and part of what appers to be a section of frill down the center of the skull, I am willing to say that it may be a new species. For such a large animal, one would expect the brow horn, the ones over the eyes, to be as much as 48 inches. This one is only 12 inches. But the nose horn is almost 12 inches which would be the right length for this size of skull. We will publish a sketch I did of it to get an idea of what it may turn out to look like.

These posts trouble me and show the problem with private collecting in general. If he is right in any way about these this data will not enter the scientific knowledge because it will not go through peer review, even if he did actually publish on it in some other source. This data and information will possibly be lost forever.

Now with that said do I think that people who find fossils on their private land should be forced to turn over their fossils? No, of course not what you find/do on your private land is up to you. Insisting otherwise is a very slippery slope one I do not feel we need to engage in. Which is why I find it interesting when Mr. Taylor says this (here):

The liberal democrat-socialists have tried many times to make it a criminal offense with jail time and huge fines for anyone other than a state approved person to collect even sea shells from public land. If they could stop you from collecting on private land they would. Then no one but state approved evolutionists would have fossils. The liberals will not stop till they tell everyone what to do in every area of our lives. WE VOTED THEM IN. NOW LET'S THROW THEM OUT!

No, sir, it is not just the "liberal democrat-socialists" that don't want people to collect on public lands. Remember Theodore Roosevelt, Republican president (here), he started the process of forming National Parks (here). The land was set aside to help preserve the nature and that is why we don't want everyone and their brother out digging for fossils, this would in fact destroy the land. So if someone is caught collecting fossils on public land then they need to be punished for it, unfortunately it is far to easy to get away with.

As Roosevelt said in an Address to the Deep Waterway Convention, Memphis, Tennessee, October 4, 1907:

...The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others.

(source)

Do you even know what you are talking about

I want to preface this post by saying I am slightly inebriated after that tough loss by VT in the quarterfinals of the NIT earlier tonight, I have a feeling I might regret this in the morning. Since I came across this earlier today I figured I would post on it.

Today's article comes from the Florida State University paper and is entitled Texas steers 'right'. Now the joke of the headline is the first line of the actual article but it also seems to be that the author is saying that Texas was right in the way in which they changed the history books recently.

Of course, denial of America as an exceptional country is a hallmark of modern liberalism. The left feels guilty that, despite its imperfections, the United States stands light-years above other nations in terms of freedom and opportunity for self-advancement. They degrade our Founding Fathers as little more than land-owning slave masters, while saying little, if anything, about the slavery that still exists in parts of Africa and the Middle East

I don't know of any liberals that do not view the US as an exceptional country they just view the US as a country that has flaws like every country that ever has or ever will. The US absolutely stands above other countries in terms of freedom but we do not stand up there as perfect, gays and lesbians do not have the same rights as most people among other flaws that we must all overcome.

Our Founding Fathers were clearly noble men but they were just men. They were flawed and lived in their time as we live in ours. People will look back on us now and will realize that we are not perfect. This is important to point out in history class, US history in particular, because it instills in all of us that we can be great people. By knowing they owned slaves and that they were not perfect we can see their flaws and learn from them so we don't make the same. You know why slavery in parts of Africa and the Middle East is not mentioned in the same class as the fact that our founding fathers owned slaves? Because that is world current events this class on the founding fathers would be U.S. History.

He goes on to say that the books not saying that Reagan was the only one who ended the cold war is wrong. I will admit that Reagan helped but it was much more complicated than that. He ends with this:

American students’ performance in math and science has plummeted relative to other countries over the years, probably in part due to other countries’ teachers not being fixated on leftist indoctrination strategies and actually doing their jobs.

This decision in Texas is cause for an optimistic appraisal of the state of affairs in American education. In a time in which the left is making one shamble after another in Washington, and people are becoming ever more discontented with them, it seems a les-than-prudent [sic] time for aging hippies to continue using the public schools as a venue to spew their long-discredited baloney.

Math and science performance has plummeted because we are afraid of offending someone. Evolution is a theory yes but in science that means it has been 99% proven but we don't talk about it to the extent that it deserves, and I could go on. The fact is that I came out of high school an ultra conservative so no our public education system is not "fixated on leftist indoctrination[...]".

The decision in Texas is a cause for sorrow. Thomas Jefferson and many other important Americans have been stricken from Texas history books, see my post for yesterday (here). Have you ever thought Mr. Berkowitz that maybe what you were being taught in high school about our history being flawed was true. Remember if we assume that we are always right and that everything that is going wrong is someone elses fault we end up in a position we don't want to be in.

Stop Politicising our class rooms

AronRa makes some great videos on YouTube and I highly recommend him for any of your evolution needs (if you will). He has also been a strong advocate against the current Texas Board of Education and their politicising of every topic (see here). Well he recently came out with a new video and since I was busy last week only just got to see it today. It is really well done and pretty much points out how much the current board is a failure:



Sign the petition (here)! and remind me not to ever let any kids I might eventually have go to school in Texas.

Really Mr. Long, Really?

So I have been sitting at 99 posts for a long time but I feel so proud I have somehow managed to put together 100 posts, counting this one. Yay! go me.

Ok now on to the real reason for this post. So one of the opinion writers, Roy Long, for the Texas Tech University paper, the Daily Toreador, has published some things before that I have disagreed with majorly (see here and trust me there are more that I didn't blog about), well he did it again. While the majority of the article (found here) I have no problem with it is about being able to change our views as new evidence comes forth, heck this is what science is all about. In fact early on he says this:

If I could travel in time and re-write those articles, I would change a few of them.

I would be more careful about wording because certain phrases I have used in columns have offended others and caused them to not pay attention to the message of the column.

Yes this is very true many times does the point of his article get lost in amongst some small piece of evidence he uses to "support" his view that is outright wrong. I will openly admit that I have had to relook over some of his articles because of this. But in the end doesn't this come down to the writer of the article?

Well this doesn't seem bad so far I was actually enjoying the article and he was making a valid point then he says this:

However, our society does not act this way. One glaring example is “Climategate.” The scientific community has been afraid to even accept data that might possibly argue the so-called climate change theory is wrong. They intentionally changed data so there would be no opposition to their theories. This is the ultimate appeal to dishonest consistency.

I literally put the paper on my desk at this point. I thought alright well climate change is still a developing science so maybe he was just confused or maybe he just hasn't read the full e-mails (see here, here, and here for starters). So I picked the paper back up and read this:

The response to the “intelligent design” theory has also been very similar. Instead of addressing the issues that have arose from Behe’s ideas, the scientific community at large has simply dismissed him because he dares question the god of evolution. Science, which was once progressive because it dared to contradict the wrong but established theories of men, has fallen to dogmatism.

I know rushed through the rest of his article and went out in the hall looking for someone to talk to, seeing no one I relaxed and read the rest of his article again. Why did this paragraph draw such a reaction out of me? Because Behe is wrong and intelligent design is not science and therefore should be dismissed by the scientific community (see Kitzmiller vs. Dover). I could cite the hundreds of people who have refuted ID as an invalid theory but in science it only takes one so may I recommend Only a Theory by Dr. Kenneth Miller (see my post here).

So why are these your two examples in the entire paper when both of them are the exact opposite of what you are trying to prove? Both ID and global climate change denialists (doesn't have the same ring as global warming denialists) are doing what you are claiming you are against. They are trying the keep the status quo the same they are not admitting they are wrong and moving on. With global climate change the e-mails were quote mined to get just a couple of quotes that sound like global climate change isn't happening or at least isn't man made. At least IDers see that there is some evidence for evolution but they still want God in there. Guess what that is still a very unprogressive statement.

So somewhere along the lines I really lost what Mr. Long was trying to argue so congrats Mr. Long you have successfully written another article that does the complete opposite of what you were trying to achieve.