New Knowledge about an Old Feud!

History is interesting, no matter how much we think we know about certain periods of time something new always seems to pop-up. In paleontology one of the best known periods of time is the late 1800s when the so called Bone Wars were taking place between E.D. Cope and O.C. March. Recent research by a team at SMU has added new knowledge to the famous feud. This video show a quick break down of the research done by the team as well as what their findings mean so it is worth a watch.



To learn more here is the press release for the paper as well as the paper itself. I will have a post related to this famous feud soon.

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines

This summer has been brutal here in the United States. Late in June, Nashville, Tennessee set an all time record high of 109^o F (~42.78^o C), and while it is a southern city it is normally only in the 90s and humid not 109 and bone dry in Nashville. Nashville wasn't alone June saw over 2000 record high temperatures set throughout the United States. These temperatures along with other climatic conditions created a Derecho which ripped through the east coast. Meanwhile a huge drought in the Western United States provided a tinderbox setting that allowed for the creation of wildfires in Colorado that are their costliest ever. As the summer has continued the drought has only gotten worse, expanding into the bread basket which is posed to make food prices over the next year skyrocket and lowering the Mississippi River to the point that it is making transport of goods on the river difficult. While most of the focus has been on the United States the Arctic also has reached a record low for sea ice extent, and what makes it even worse is this occurred weeks before the normal low. While it is true that no single event can be blamed on climate change it is the addition of all of these events, and the events in past years, that start to build a consensus toward climate change increasing the severity of overall events.

These leads us to a book published earlier this year by Dr. Michael Mann titled, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Dr. Mann is the lead author on two of the most important papers in climate science, the papers that show the long term temperature trends and have been termed the hockey stick graphs (so you can see where the title of the book comes from). This book starts while Dr. Mann is still in graduate school and in the beginning shows the point where climate research was in the early 90s. Once Dr. Mann gets involved in climate science the two stories converge and we see how his graph was just one piece in greater puzzle of climate change. Once the scientific consensus is truly established, around 2000, the book switches to a tone of how Dr. Mann had to defend himself from attacks against him, mostly from non-climate scientists, accusing him of doing bad science in the creation of the graph. He shows not only what these arguments were but how the scientific community refutes them and how his graph, with only minor tweaks, still survives to this day. This includes a brief description of the hacked emails from a few years ago and how they don't actually say what people think they say. This tells the tale of Dr. Mann's life and how it has changed since the publication of the hockey stick graph.

This book is, in my opinion, one of the most important books out there. Dr. Mann's telling of the story allows you to see him not as the man who is so often ripped on by climate "skeptics" but as a man who got caught in the middle of something just by doing the science. This is true of many scientists in fields of science where there might be some "controversy", such as climate science and evolution. The main difference is that Dr. Mann didn't ask for it he just ended up in this position because of a question he had been wondering for a while. The way the story is told allows the reader to build on knowledge learned earlier, as a true scientist would, but does not expect the reader to come into the book with all of the back ground. He also backs up his claims, scientific or accusations against him, through a many citations as well as many footnotes making it possible to look up all of his claims. You can see the evidence for climate change growing as the book goes on while the attacks against the graph get weaker and weaker till they seem to be just personal attacks, as prior attacks continue to fail.

One of the problems I do see with the book is the amount it does build on itself. I understand the need for this but citations in the book to see earlier chapters can make a reader get lost if, like me, they had to take several breaks from reading the book that spanned time due to other commitments. I understand the need for this, I am certain that it shortens the book and makes it less repetitive, it just made it hard for me as well. Part of the difficulty as far as this is concerned is that I was reading the Kindle version so flipping back to earlier chapters may wasn't as easy as having the physical book, so take this complaint with a grain of salt. My other problem is just how well cited the book is. I am not saying this is bad in and of itself but as I could click on a link and it would take me to the footnote/citation I wish that the citations had been cited as they would in a scientific paper whereas footnotes would be numbered. It would often lead to me getting a little lost as went back and forth a couple of times reading footnotes and citation. Some of the footnotes were also quite long and could likely have been put in the text itself as they typically only added to the information in the book and didn't really take the story off on long tangents.

Overall this book is a must read, not just for those who understand the science of climate change but for everyone especially those who question the science behind climate change because it will give you the full story and allow you to understand just how strong the science is. As I was finishing the book the Heartland Institute posted billboards with mass murderers touting climate change as happening. While this would end up blowing up in their faces it is important to understand the science so that these false comparisons can be shown for what they are, fear mongering pure and simple!

Book Citation
Mann, Michael E. 2012. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Columbia University Press, New York, 384p.

Book review page

Busy Summer!

Let me just say I am sorry that I haven't had time to post more over the past few months this summer has been crazy busy for me. I have a few posts that I need to finish up; including 2 book reviews, a National Park Series post, and a museum visit. I hope to finish up at least one of those today and should have the rest out by early next week. While you wait here is a comic by SMBC that I missed posting while I was away and below the fold with be two videos by Potholer54, his 2nd and 3rd Golden Crocoduck nominees.

The Future of Wind Energy

Greenman3610 takes on the idea that wind energy is not as efficient in this video and explains why cutting funding to the growing industry would be a bad idea.

Why do people still refer to Hovind?

Seriously I wonder that all the time. Anyway another great take-down of Hovind/anti-evolution arguments by Potholer54

Crazy March

By now most people probably know that NOAA has said that March 2012 was the warmest March on record, well if you are wondering why Greenman3610 has a great two part video series, below, explaining why.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Location: On the border between Tennessee and North Carolina containing portions of the counties of Swain and Haywood in North Carolina and Sevier, Blount, and Cocke in Tennessee.

Introduction:

Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Smokies for simplicities sake) (Wikipedia page) is actually a park that I have been to several times before but most of these times were before I had started blogging at all. It had been a while since I had done anything outdoorsy let along go to a National Park it was nice when my wife and I were able to get away for a weekend and head out there. While it is still too long a drive for us to justify heading out there every weekend if you live in the Knoxville area it is ~1 hour away and totally worth many trips.

The Smokies is a huge park encompassing over 500,000 acres total between Tennessee and North Carolina. What makes it more impressive is on several sides are National Forests making the natural beauty of the area seem to go on forever. The towns around the area are very cliche and touristy but this means the type of people you will meet in this park varies drastically from who you will meet in other parks. In fact the Smokies were the 3rd most visited park in 2011 with over 9 million visitors. This isn't always a good thing for someone who enjoys getting away from it all as there are people who head to this park that likely haven't been or won't be headed to any other park so typical park/hiking etiquette is often thrown out the window, along with garbage sometimes I am afraid. This isn't the fault of anyone who works at the park but its location is part of the problem. As I mentioned it is only an hour from Knoxville but it is within driving distance for many other major cities in the Eastern United States, such as Atlanta, GA. It is also free to get in, minus any charge for camping if you do that or hotel if you don't.

With all of that said if you live nearby and haven't checked out the Smokies yet you need to. There is a natural beauty to the park that is not seen in many of the big cities on the east coast. Trees, including old growth forest, abound and animal life from the common white tailed deer to the less common black bear are very often seen but perhaps most impressively and only rarely seen are the Elk which were reintroduced to the park in 2001, I have never actually seen elk (although I am pretty sure I saw evidence of them this past trip, even if it is an area where they aren't known to be so I could obviously be wrong and it could just be evidence of a large deer). Much of the local plant life is on display as well and during the spring there is a rush of people coming in to photograph the wildflowers, they were just starting to open up when we were there, and in the fall there is just as big a rush to take pictures of the beautiful fall leaves that makes the area many brilliant colors. I have been in both the summer and winter as well, and trust me both those times are absolutely beautiful as well.

Heavy visitation and being near so many urban areas has also effected several other aspects of the Smokies. While it gets it's name from the fog and low clouds that sometimes cover the area air pollution has been causing problems from as simple as making views appear hazy to as dramatic as killing plants due to the effects of acid rain. Another major problem has been the infestation of an insect called the hemlock woolly adelgid. This insect infects hemlock trees and basically sucks them dry causing them to die off, you can see evidence of this throughout the park, both dead and infected trees abound, and like the American Chestnut in the '20s and '30s the hemlock is likely to be extinct in the region soon if the National Park Service can't get it under control. That doesn't mean they aren't trying to stop the spread of this insect but they may already be fighting a losing battle.

All the problems you would expect with a major tourist destination aside, yes that includes traffic jams, the park is big enough and there are enough areas that are not visited much that it is easy to find yourself in the peace and serenity of nature. I will be headed back soon and every visit I find something new. The area is beautiful and even if you don't want to see nature you can see buildings built when the area was still the frontier or you can just be a tourist and stay in the towns around the area and just go check out the visitor center there are many different options.

Geology:

Interestingly enough the geology of the Smokies gives me a great place to pick up from Russell Cave NM and C&CNMP as far as the geology of the southeast is concerned. It is worth going to check those two out because the rest of this post is going to be based on the assumption that you already at least partially understand what is going on there.

Looking at the regional geologic map, which can be downloaded or opened here (you will have to click on the link for the huge PDF), it should become obvious that the area has two primary geologic rock types. To the north and west there are primarily sedimentary rocks, these rocks are similar, although not quite the same aged as those at RCNM and C&CNMP. These sedimentary rocks represent the Ridge and Valley Province and were likely laid down in conditions similar to those of a warm shallow sea. To the south and east the rocks contain a mix of igneous and metamorphic with metamorphic rocks being the primary constituent. These rocks represent the next geologic province the Blue Ridge Province (also known as the Blue Ridge Mountains). The contact between these two provinces can vary from place to place, in some areas of the east the sedimentary rocks of the Ridge and Valley slowly become more and more metamorphic till they are the very metamorphic rocks of the Blue Ridge while in other areas the transition is very abrupt.

Moving on to the more local map, found here (warning link goes to PDF), you can see that the majority of the park consist of metamorphic rocks, meaning that the Smokies are located in the Blue Ridge. So lets talk on a very short description of how the Blue Ridge formed. Very simply the Blue Ridge was formed by accretionary metamorphism. During the formation of Pangaea as well as the formation of the previous super continent Rodinia, during the Precambrian more specifically the Mesoproterozoic the east coast of the US moved eastward. During this time subduction of an oceanic plate was occurring under the continent, this produced a lot of heat (this is why there are currently volcanoes on the West Coast and why there are igneous rock on the east coast (and even this comes with a caveat that it isn't a Triassic/Jurassic rift basin)) and pressure. This heat and pressure caused changes in the rocks in what is now the Blue Ridge and Piedmont changing them from sedimentary to metamorphic rocks and why in some areas the transition is very hard to see. In the Ridge and Valley this accretion caused the many different anticlines and synclines you see but similar things happened in the Blue Ridge some fell over or got pushed over the younger sedimentary rocks to the west, this will be important in a minute.

During the Mesozoic the Appalachian Mountains, of which the Blue Ridge is a part, may have been as tall as the Rockies are currently but as accretion/subduction stopped so did the mountain building and eventually the only force acting on the mountains was erosion. As the Appalachian got more and more rounded off and lower in elevation due to erosion all of this rock material flooded the continental shelf. This caused loading on the shelf which lifted up the continent and again raised the mountains. There are some ideas why you can have the same rocks in the Piedmont and Blue Ridge but a huge elevation change is due to the a fault or some other geologic feature being able to act on the western side and force up the Blue Ridge while other ideas say that the Piedmont has just been eroded away. All of this relates to the uplift currently of both the Blue Ridge and the Ridge and Valley, which allows rivers like the New River to form great cuts in locations.

During all of this time the rocks on the Blue Ridge that had been pushed on top of the younger sedimentary rocks in portions of the Smokies were being eroded away as well. In several areas these rocks completely eroded away to expose the underlying sedimentary rocks in what is known as a tectonic windows. This is why on the geologic map you may have areas of old, non alluvium, sedimentary rock surrounded on all sides by metamorphic rock. The most famous example of this, also one of the most visited (I am sure most of the people who visit it don't even realize what they are driving through), is Cades Cove in which the ~9 mile driving/biking route follows most of the outer edge of the window.

That is a very short summary of the geology but as it is getting long already I will call it quits. As should be obvious from this is just how complicated the geology that formed the Smokies, and much of the east coast in general, actually is.

More Pictures: All images are by the author ask permission if you want to use them, and if you do make sure you give me credit.

Further Reading:
Southworth, S., A. Schultz, and D. Denenny. 2005. Geologic map of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Region, Tennessee and North Carolina. U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2005-1225. (Link goes to PDF)

Thornberry-Ehrlich, T. 2008. Great Smoky Mountains National Park Geologic Resource Evaluation Report. Natural Resource Report NPS/NRPC/GRD/NRR—2008/048. National Park Service, Denver, Colorado. (Link goes to PDF)

NPS website on the geology of the Smokies.

National Park Service Series Page

5 years

[This post isn't like most on this blog it is very personal and I have debated on whether or not to publish it. It is personal and I don't want it to distract from what I normally do here, not that I have posted in a while. But I needed this, call it selfish if you wish, it is, but what else is a blog for. This post is definitely not the best one I have ever done, written in one sitting with very little thought for grammar but it is how my mind put it. In the end I needed to say something here, make what I have said in private every year public for whatever reason I think it will help. If you don't want to read I completely understand and I will try to get back to something more sciency soon, but for the time just hang with me.]

I couldn't sleep last night. No, it wasn't because I was waiting on a grade or had a big project due. It wasn't because someone was angry with me or that I was nervous about some upcoming meeting. It wasn't because I am excited for an upcoming birthday or holiday. No, it was for a much more somber reason today marks the 5th anniversary of the mass shooting that shocked the university I love, Virginia Tech. If there is one thing that is sure to keep me up at night it is thinking about that day what happened and how it effected me but more importantly those who I care for. That day is a combination between a blur and very vivid to me, a blur because it happened so fast and vivid because I remember little details that still bring up a surge of emotions that I am incapable of stopping. I remember the police and ambulance sirens, rare but not unheard of, at formation in the morning; I remember pushing the dorm door open to go to class only to have a wave of students push me back in and tell me not to leave; I remember the cold, especially for April, air that whole day and the occasional snow flake; I remember our Deputy Commandant asking if any of us knew of the location of a cadet, a member of the band, who no one had heard from, Matthew Joseph La Porte. These memories are hard emotionally but at the same time there are memories that make me feel the strength of the Virginia Tech community. I remember the memorial that, created by students, was formed overnight; I remember the convocation not because the President was there but because of the thousands of Hokies showing one moment of strength; I remember the lone base drum on the march to the candlelight vigil on the 17th; I remember the following Monday, as school started back up, my classes were full, everyone was there, we may have been nervous but we weren't going to allow one person destroy us and destroy our school. One memory I don't have much memory of is the way the media covered the situation because by 3 PM on the 16th we couldn't watch anymore news and I would not turn the news back on my TV for well over a week. I have seen the videos since that show the strength of the Hokie community the maturity of my fellow students amazes me to this day. Would I have reacted the same as them? I would like to think so but to be honest I am glad I didn't have to face that challenge.

Since that day a lot has changed. Over the months that followed I was asked repeatedly if I was there, if I knew someone who was killed. The answers are always yes and over those months I expected that I knew how people would react, what people would ask. I love Virginia Tech it gave me so many great things among them include; a great education, a place I want to return to (often enough I got married there), friends closer than I could have ever imagined, and most importantly a beautiful intelligent wife. It also gave me a sense of community, it seems that everywhere I go from Baton Rouge, LA to Lubbock, TX, from Nashville, TN, to Las Vegas, NV, I have run into one or several Hokies. For this reason I wear VT stuff everywhere I go shouts of, "Let's Go Hokies!" I have heard everywhere including for a Colonel in the United States Air Force at Atlanta Hatfield International Airport. I bring this up because I know everywhere I go I will still get questions, were you there, did you know anyone? These don't bother me coming from people who have known me for a while but when I first meet you and those are your first questions about my school it effects me. While I know that in many people's minds that is what Virginia Tech will always be known for I would rather people know it for the great architecture and engineering programs, producing great leaders in both the military and the civilian world, or even for having one hell of a great football team. I know that even if someone only knows it for the horrible tragedy that happened nearby there is always someone who knows it for the drillfield, the beautiful buildings and campus, the excitement of a Thursday night game in Lane Stadium, hiking on the nearby Appalachian Trail, or for the sense of community that has always existed from being a Hokie.

My life changed that day, I no longer live just for myself I want to be a stellar representative of my university, I live for the 32. There names should always be remembered; Ross A. Alameddine, Christopher James Bishop, Brian R. Bluhm, Ryan Christopher Clark, Austin Michelle Cloyd, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, Kevin P. Granata, Matthew Gregory Gwaltney, Caitlin Millar Hammaren, Jeremy Michael Herbstritt, Rachael Elizabeth Hill, Emily Jane Hilscher, Jarrett Lee Lane, Matthew Joseph La Porte, Henry J. Lee, Liviu Librescu, G.V. Loganathan, Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan, Lauren Ashley McCain, Daniel Patrick O’Neil, Juan Ramon Ortiz-Ortiz, Minal Hiralal Panchal, Daniel Alejandro Perez Cueva, Erin Nicole Peterson, Michael Steven Pohle, Jr., Julia Kathleen Pryde, Mary Karen Read, Reema Joseph Samaha, Waleed Mohamed Shaalan, Leslie Geraldine Sherman, Maxine Shelly Turner, and Nicole Regina White. I try to live every day by the university's motto, "Ut Prosim", that I may serve. The 5 years have seemed to have flown by and while much of the time in between in a blur I remember that day. So as I sit here in West Texas there is a chill in the air, not as cold as that day but still much cooler than it has been the last few, it seems fitting. If I am the only person I see wearing Maroon and Orange today I would not be surprised but I know that I am not alone, not the only one who remembers. 5 years of memories have been coming back to me since last night and because of that I couldn't sleep last night and I know I won't sleep tonight.

"WE ARE VIRGINIA TECH"

Golden Crocoduck Nominees 1

So Potholer54 has the first of his Golden Crocoduck videos for this year! Enjoy.

Pterosaur Launch and Flight

This is an interesting talk, at least to someone who is interested in pterosaurs, by Dr. Michael Habib on how the giant pterosaurs may have been able to launch and fly. And good job by the Royal Tyrrell Museum for posting this talk.

Correlation and Causation

Sometimes while talking with creationists I feel like I have said this multiple times but it doesn't seem they notice. Anyway enjoy today's SMBC.

C0nc0rdance reads Darwin

Yes I know Sunday was Darwin day sorry I am a few days late. As a treat here is a selection for Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, see my copy here, read by C0nc0rdance, see a previous reading by him here. The recording isn't great but he ends with one of my favorite lines:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Himalayan Glacial Melt

So as I covered in my last post, and many others, climate change is happening and we know this through several different lines of evidence. One of those lines of evidence is ice loss and while most of the focus has been on sea ice, particularly in the Arctic, continental glaciers, like those on Antarctica and Greenland, have been losing ice as well. A new study was recently released that set to find out how much and showed that overall these continental glaciers are losing ice. The news media decided to pick on something else from the paper and that was the Himalayan glaciers and decided for some reason that over the last 10 years there has been no ice melting there. Potholer54 decided to actually read the paper and he decided to point out what the media decided to ignore.

Climate Change is Real!

This week's eSkeptic featured an article by Dr. Donald Prothero in which he discusses climate change; how we know it occurring, how we know we are causing it, and why people try to deny it. It is overall a good article and he presents many facts so I recommend you read it in its entirety (this link will skip the heading portion of this week's eSkeptic) but I wanted to focus on one thing he said.

“I agree that climate is changing, but I’m skeptical that humans are the main cause, so we shouldn’t do anything.” This is just fence sitting. A lot of reasonable skeptics deplore the “climate denialism” of the right wing, but still want to be skeptical about the cause. If they want proof, they can examine the huge array of data that directly points to humans causing global warming.²⁰ We can directly measure the amount of carbon dioxide humans are producing, and it tracks exactly with the amount of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Through carbon isotope analysis, we can show that this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is coming directly from our burning of fossil fuels, not from natural sources. We can also measure oxygen levels that drop as we produce more carbon that then combines with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide. We have satellites in space that are measuring the heat released from the planet and can actually see the atmosphere get warmer. The most crucial proof emerged only in the past few years: climate models of the greenhouse effect predict that there should be cooling in the stratosphere (the upper layer of the atmosphere above 10 km (6 miles) in elevation, but warming in the troposphere (the bottom layer of the atmosphere below 10 km (6 miles), and that’s exactly what our space probes have measured. Finally, we can rule out any other culprits (see above): solar heat is decreasing since 1940, not increasing, and there are no measurable increases in cosmic radiation, methane, volcanic gases, or any other potential cause. Face it—it’s our problem.

I will admit I was at this point for a few years as well but it is the combination of all the evidence that he mentions, along with other pieces of evidence, that eventually made me realize I was wrong. That is how science works and that is why people who are ignoring the science of climate change are wrong.

Deep Time

As a geologist I try my best to understand deep time. Deep time refers to the history of the planet that we find in the fossil record as well as within the rock record and in what we can see in outer space about the formation of the universe. I try to reach out to make it accessible to everyone who is a reader of this blog and try to make it accessible in some of the long running series that I have such as the National Park Service series in which I try to incorporate geology as best I can for parks that don't always deal with geology at all. One of my favorite blogs, Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, does science outreach in a more fun and interesting way. That is why when I saw this post over there yesterday I knew I had to link to it, seriously read their post, and share the video of David Christian discussing the importance of understanding deep time, what he calls big history, during a TED talk. This is why I blog what I do, we need to understand our place in the universe to truly understand who we are!

Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution

As with the museum posts(page) it really don't make sense search wise to name my book review posts book review # so I am going to go to naming them the title of the book for simplicities sake. Now on to the review.

It was a typical day in the Late Jurassic (Tithonian to be specific) on a small island located in the Tethys Ocean on what is currently the Bavarian region of Germany. The climate was warm and dry and the sun was beaming down on the small bush sized plants that covered the island. Out over the sea a group of pterosaurs (for me I will say Rhamphorhynchus muensteri) caught fish that swam to close to the surface near the reef while the breath of some of the marine reptiles (e.g. ichthyosaurs) broke the surface on occasion. On shore small theropod dinosaurs poked around in the bushes hoping to find a lizard or insect that they may be able to eat. The young Archaeopteryx had watched this scene play out plenty of times but only recently away from the safety of her mother's nest but at least now she could fly, well at least short distances and her flight wasn't very powerful due to her sternal keel still being cartilage. Her black feathers glistened in the sunlight and as a curious Compsognathus got too close she snapped her toothed jaw at it and flew slightly higher out of grasp for the dinosaur. She of course was a dinosaur too but there was something special about her she also had a lot of features that made her look more bird like than dinosaur like except for her long tail and her toothed "beak", and she certainly wasn't the first dinosaur to look bird-like but she would become when discovered one of the most important. As she looked out over the sea toward the dark black clouds that had been approaching for a while now she realized she was hungry it had been a while since she ate after all. Something hit her on the head and then more and more she wasn't quite sure what this was after all it hadn't rained, at least not much, her entire life. The rain drops also disturbed a dragonfly nearby from the branch it was sitting on and she took off after it. As she closed in a strong gust of wind blew her out over the reef, this was further out to sea than she had ever been. She looked toward shore and then the wind picked up even more. 150 million years later, in 1861, a slab of limestone is split from a quarry in the Solnhofen formation and she would again see the light of a new day but the world would be completely different than the one she lived in but she too would change it greatly.

While that story is clearly fictional the idea behind it is the vast amount of information that we have learned about Archaeopteryx lithographica since the first one was discovered in 1861. While most of this knowledge has been out there for years the first time that I truly saw it all compiled in one place was in a book I just finished called Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution by Dr. Peter Wellnhofer (someone really needs to update and expand on his Wikipedia page). In this book we are taken to Solnhofen where we learn about the limestone that Archaeopteryx was deposited in and how this helps understand the environment that this animal lived in. We then learn about the animal itself and Dr. Wellnhofer tries to fit it into a phylogenetic location which includes a discussion on the different views of how birds evolved as well as the evolution of flight. While there have only been a total of ten (well eleven but the most recent one hasn't been published on yet and was just found late in 2011) body specimens and one isolated feather found we know so much about this animal. Part of the reason is how complete the specimens are with most being nearly complete but what I think the main reason for the amount we know about the animal is the just sheer amount of research that has been done on the specimens since it was the first animal found that truly showed the evolution of organisms in action, in this case the evolution of dinosaurs to birds.

This book is exceptionally well written and that is due to the sheer amount of knowledge that Dr. Wellnhofer has on paleontology and in particular the Solnhofen region. If you want to learn about Archaeopteryx or if you want to learn about Solnhofen geology or if you just want a book with really really nice pictures of really amazing fossils this is the book for you. Detailed images of all 10 of the specimens are included including pictures taken using infrared which really helps show off a lot of the soft tissue preserved in the specimen. There is a detailed description of the genus in general as well as where it fits evolutionarily which includes a very through description of the origin of birds including the many hypothesis of what the evolved from, and he, logically, leans toward them evolving from theropod dinosaurs. There is also a brief overview of the different ideas of how flight and feathers evolved and a basic overview of known, as of 2009, Mesozoic bird species.

If there is one fault in the book it is that it is too detailed. At times I felt like I was dredging through scientific papers, this is part of the reason it took me so long to finish, so if you aren't an expert in the field or haven't spent a lot of time reading scientific papers on dinosaur and bird evolution you might struggle a bit through parts. Most of the book is easily readable and the parts that are technical can be skipped or skimmed over without missing the overall point or theme of the section so don't let the technical nature scare you off. The price might scare you off but it is worth it for all the knowledge contained within.

The only other problem is that the book is dated which should say something about how fast the science has come since 2009. This is really that much of a problem after all how was Dr. Wellnhofer supposed to know that since I started reading the book early last year that phylogenetic studies would say that Archaeopteryx is not a bird (Naish et al., 2011; Xu et al. 2011), although at least one study disagrees (Lee & Worthy, 2011), that the color of the feathers would be determined (Carney et al., 2012), and that an even earlier feathered dinosaur would be discovered (Liu et al., 2012) (I got the e-mail about that last one as I was working on this review). So I will forgive the book seemingly being slightly dated since there are so many new specimens found in the paleontology world every year, there have been several new Mesozoic birds found in the past year (e.g. Xu et al., 2011).

This book is very interesting and worth picking up. It is a handy reference for the currently known specimens as well as about the evolution of birds in general. Oh and did I mention it has very awesome pictures, yeah they are very pretty. I will leave you, again, with a picture of the one specimen of Archaeopteryx that I have seen, the Thermopolis specimen, it was a great experience.

Book citation
Wellnhofer, P. 2009. Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution. Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfeil, Munchen, 208p.

References
Lee, M. S. Y., & T. H. Worthy. 2011. Likelihood reinstates Archaeopteryx as a primitive bird. Biology Letters doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0884.

Liu, Y.-Q., Kuang, H.-W., Jiang, X.-J., Peng, N., Xu, H., & Sun, H.-Y. 2012. Timing of the earliest known feathered dinosaurs and transitional pterosaurs older than the Jehol Biota. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology doi: 10.1016/j.palaeo.2012.01.017.

Naish, D., Dyke, G., Cau, A., Escuillié, F. & Godefroit, P. 2011. A gigantic bird from the Upper Cretaceous of Central Asia. Biology Letters doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0683 (I should note that there is some doubt if this is actually a bird anymore but that shouldn't change the phylogentic tree published within)

Xu, X., You, H., Du, K. & Han, F. 2011. An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of Avialae. Nature 475, 465-470.

Book review page

Housekeeping

I wanted to cover a few housekeeping items in this post but they will be short and to the point.

The first thing I wanted to point out is that I have added links on the National Park Service Series as well as the Museum Visit pages so they are easier to navigate. Now you can click the link on the page for the state postal abbreviation and it should take you to the state (if you don't know the state postal abbreviation I have included a link on both pages to a Wikipedia page with a listing of them and it can also be found here). This doesn't mean I have filled in many of the states yet there are still a lot of blanks but I wanted to make it easier for the future or so you at least don't have to scroll as far for the sites I have visited.

I have also created a new page that will link to the book reviews. This will allow you to look back at past book reviews if you want and will save me the time energy and space of having to link to a bunch of pages at the bottom of each book review. The books are organized by title, I know it should have been author's last name but well I was working on it at 2am so give me a break I will try to put up a portion organized by author later, so if you know the title you are looking for you can get to the review I have done. I am also always looking for additional ideas of books to review so if you want to leave them on that page go right ahead. On that note I should also point out that there should be a new book review coming out either this afternoon or tomorrow so look for that.

That is all I have but I welcome any comments that you all have. I was thinking of writing up a few posts on the geology of certain regions as well as starting a series on zoos I have been to so let me know what you think of those ideas and if you have any other ideas go ahead and post them in the comments.

I am the Spirit of Science

So after the last post I figured I would post something more comical, yesterday's SMBC comic!

What you should actually get out of college

I am going to start by saying that this post may seem to get a little politicy and that is because politics have gotten in the way of getting a college education. And one more thing most of this post is actually after the video so don't just watch the video and move on.

The last time I did a post on college it got a lot of views and actually got 2 comments, seriously people I want you to comment on the posts here it only helps me. Now those 2 comments happened to be spam so yeah I kind of expect more of that. Anyway I wanted to do this post because of a couple of things I have seen recently. The first is this video featuring Rick Santorum.



First lets pretend for a minute that CNN knew how to format a video for YouTube so it didn't come out all stretched out like that. I will grant Santorum that most college professors are left leaning to very liberal and that some, a small minority in my experiences, may actually try to "indoctrinate" their students. Most of my experience showed that professors tried to teach their students facts and if those facts run counter to what you grew up believing or being taught then you have to do some serious searching. What a lot of other professors do is try to teach you how to think critically this allows students to eventually look at some of what they were taught growing up and realize that it is wrong or that why they believe that was actually wrong so they need to rethink if they actually believe that. It seems to me that what the religious right is actually fearing about college is not the education itself it is the fact that students are being taught facts and that they are being taught how to think critically.

Which brings up this bill in the Virginia Legislature. Currently this bill is only in a subcommittee and so it still has a long way to go but what it would do if passed is nothing less than turn all colleges in the state of Virginia into schools that would not challenge a person's beliefs and wouldn't actually teach students anything. Here is the full text of the bill:

HOUSE BILL NO. 1207

Offered January 19, 2012
A BILL to protect the right of students to assert conscientious objection to any requirement of an academic degree program in an institution of higher education; liability.
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Patrons-- Pogge and Cole

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Referred to Committee on Education

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Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia:

1. § 1. No public or private institution of higher learning shall expel, suspend, punish, penalize, discipline, deny academic credit to, require participation in a remediation program for, or discriminate against a student because he refuses to perform academic coursework or any other degree requirement on the grounds that it would force him to violate a sincerely held religious belief.

§ 2. The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia shall not recognize any accrediting agency that denies full accreditation to, or otherwise takes any adverse action against, an academic program in any institution of higher learning in the Commonwealth because the institution exempts students from academic coursework or a degree requirement that would force any student to violate his sincerely held religious beliefs.

§ 3. The Attorney General or any student, prospective student, or former student aggrieved under this act may bring a civil action against the institution of higher learning, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, or the relevant accrediting agency for damages, injunctive and declaratory relief, and any other relief authorized by law and shall be entitled to reasonable attorney fees and costs if that party substantially prevails on the merits of an action brought under this section.

What this bill does is says that a public college cannot force a student to take a class that is against their religious beliefs. This would allow students to get a degree in biology without taking a class on evolution or allow a student to take a geology class and answer a question on a quiz asking the age of the earth as only 6000 years old. This totally defeats the point of college. A student goes into college with a certain set of beliefs and knowledge and if these are not challenged while the student is in college they likely never will be and this will only make the students that come out of colleges more ignorant.

I did my undergrad at a public university in Virginia and seeing this upset me. My degree would start to become meaningless. What has probably surprised me the most is that I have only seen one mention of this bill and that was how I found out about. Nothing from NCSE or any other organization to show that they even acknowledge that it is even in existence. Maybe I have missed something, and if I have please post it in the comments below, and if there has been something I will take back what I am currently saying. Remember you have the right to religious freedom but you do not have the right to not be offended or to have someone make you question your beliefs!

Sorry, about that now back to our regularly scheduled programing.

Interview of Dr. Hayhoe

Another video, this time by Greenman3610, is an interview with Dr. Katharine Hayhoe from Texas Tech University. It is sad some of the intimidation that she has had to face because she dared say that the climate is in fact warming and we are likely the cause of it. Having met her a couple of times I know she is extremely nice and I can't imagine why people would act like this other than to discourage her continued research.

Explanation of Human Ancestry Made Easy

So a few years ago Potholer54 made a video series pretty much explaining the history of the earth and life and one of those videos was Human Ancestry Made Easy. He apparently got some questions about some of the content. Now I use the term questions loosely here because it is pretty obviously creationists trying to show that evolution doesn't work, even though it does and they are wrong. I think the bigger issue is just the way Potholer54 phrased the statement and he at least tries to explain it here, although I don't think he did a perfect job with it either but he at least got closer.

2011 was the...

9th warmest year of the recorded period, from 1880 till now. This is according to NASA who have apparently finished calculating their data. It is also the 9th warmest year in the past 10 which has now seen 9 of the top 10 warmest years on record. This is what we should expect to see if the climate was in fact warming, every year won't be the warmest but decades on a whole should be getting warmer. In fact this is true, the 00s were warmer than the 90s the 90s warmer than the 80s, something is clearly happening you have to be openly trying to ignore the data not to see that. The image below is from NASA and shows the yearly temperature average since 1880, I have also included a little blurb from the same article below but I recommend you read the whole thing.

From NASA:

The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting," said GISS Director James E. Hansen. "So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record."

The difference between 2011 and the warmest year in the GISS record (2010) is 0.22 degrees F (0.12 C). This underscores the emphasis scientists put on the long-term trend of global temperature rise. Because of the large natural variability of climate, scientists do not expect temperatures to rise consistently year after year. However, they do expect a continuing temperature rise over decades.

The first 11 years of the 21st century experienced notably higher temperatures compared to the middle and late 20th century, Hansen said. The only year from the 20th century in the top 10 warmest years on record is 1998.

Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park

Location: Northwestern Georgia near the border with Tennessee and Alabama in portions of the counties of Catoosa, Dade, and Walker as well as in Southeastern Tennessee in and around the city of Chattanooga in Hamilton County.

Introduction:
On the same trip that my wife and I went to Russell Cave National Monument we also hit up Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park (Wikipedia page), since we were going down to the Chattanooga area anyway. This park is actually consists of a grouping of several parks that are in close proximity so they all fall under one name. The reason for this is that the city of Chattanooga had taken over many of the locations used in the battle after the Civil War ended so the NPS had to purchase some of the land piecemeal as well as having several things within the city itself. Another reason why it is multiple pieces of land is that there are in fact 2 main battles that took place in this area, one would eventually lead to the other but there is a gap in time in between.

I grew up as a history buff and one of the most interesting times to me was the American Civil War. As such I have been to many of the battle sites and I have always enjoyed them as they are always interesting and try to show you the scale, not only geographically but of human loss, that each site exhibits. I have been to where the war started, Fort Sumter, where the war ended, Appomattox Court House (sorry about that not linking to a post this was before I started blogging), and many places in between, including Gettysburg and many of the sites in Northern Virginia (again sorry for not having a post but those trips were also before I started blogging). Each battle has its own story and at everyone the NPS staff works to let you know not only how the battle fit into the overall story, but also how the battle fits in to the stories of individual from the war, and we aren't just talking General here but everyone down to the lowly privates.

Growing up and spending a lot of my time in the east it is easy to forget how major many of the battles of the west were. The east is where the show was, the west was how the North won the war. By the September of 1863 the Confederates were in trouble and they were starting to feel it. By this time the Battle of Gettysburg had happened and the Union had won not only there but in Vicksburg and now controlled the entire Mississippi River. The South was feeling the choke of the Union blockade and knew something had to be done. The North leading up to these battles had almost taken all of Tennessee and the marches leading to this battle would allow a Union capture of Chattanooga.

The Battle of Chickamauga would represent a slight turn for the Confederates. Union forces held the high ground and the ground easiest to defend by the start of the second day of the battle. Some costly maneuvers due to some poorly written/poorly understood orders would lead the a Union retreat that was averted total disaster by Union forces capturing the highest ground around an almost cliff like climb for the Confederates brought an end to fighting. By the next morning the Union troops had fallen back to the city of Chattanooga itself.

The city of Chattanooga sits at a bend in the Tennessee River and is surrounded to the south and east by high ridges. The Union stayed in the city which allowed the Confederates to put their guns in a position to fire heavily into the city. But the Union over the long run had more men and better weaponry. Eventually a commanding officer would be put in place who could handle the situation. The Union forced open a supply line which brought in fresh troops and supplies so that by the end of November the Union forces would be able to take back the hills around the city. The attack began on what is known as Lookout Mountain and eventually Union forces climbed to the top to find that the Confederates who had started the day shooting at them had abandoned their positions. The Union victory and ability to hold Chattanooga would allow General Sherman to have a supply base on his march to Atlanta and eventually to the sea.

I have been to several different types of Civil War sites and this one had a uniqueness of its own. Civil War sites in cities, like Petersburg, often feel cramped in or at least surrounded while those out in the country, like Appomattox Court House, often feel like they take forever to get to. This site has a little bit of both. You feel a little ways away from the hustle of the city while not actually being that far. I enjoyed the trip and recommend anyone in the area to head down and check it out.

Geology:

I don't want to repeat myself too much here so I recommend you go check out my post on Russell Cave National Monument as these two sites are only about 30 minutes away from each other so the overall geology isn't that different. What I want to stress here is just how important geology is to wars, especially the Civil War, and I can assure you I can think of several more sites where geology plays a major role in the way the battle was won/lost. While the actual knowledge of geology was not important for the battle the way the battle took place could only have occurred because of the set up of the geology in the area.

The Battle of Chickamauga was takes place in an area of low rolling hills with some areas of higher relief. The rocks in the area where the battle took place represent what is known as the Ridge and Valley Province. These rocks have been heavily uplifted as well as folded and faulted. There are also a lot of limestone in the area and this is easily eroded away to produce sinkholes or just lower areas where rivers and streams flow. At the end of the first day and beginning of the second day the Union forces held a line on a slight limestone ridge, they owed this ridge due to erosional factors that had lowered the surrounding area while the ground sloped more gently behind them. This gentle slope led the the next formation above/younger than the one they were on. While the eventual falling apart of the Union line had little to do with geology their survival is directly because of it. Where the younger higher formation has a lot more limestone in it, this means it erodes faster, this quicker erosion can cause steeper cliffs to form since the erosion is going to be faster at the edge and with a more easily eroded formation the erosion will likely start from the edge, since that is where the rock is exposed. As the Union forces retreated they regrouped up on top of a short steep ridge. This was enough for them to gain an area where they had the firing advantage and were able to hold off the Confederates long enough to form a more cohesive retreat.

The Battle of Chattanooga is a different story though. The high ground around the city of Chattanooga is due to the ridges being caped by a layer of sandstone and/or conglomerate. These rock types are harder to erode and as such will stand up longer to erosional forces than will other rock types. The city itself sits primarily on the flood plain for the Tennessee River. These river sediments buried arrowheads and other archeological remains so that they could be found in what is now another part of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, in what is known as Moccasin Bend, we did not get a chance to go here however (mostly because most of it is closed off to the public). These ridges gave the Confederates a better firing angle on the city but they did not use them well enough as supply lines were eventually opened. Under the sandstone layer are more layers of limestone this is why the sandstone in this location is interpreted as a river setting that temporary buried a calcite producing system, if you want to know how look at how far the plume of debris from the Mississippi River goes out into the Gulf of Mexico today. The lower layers being limestone creates really steep cliffs on the sides of the ridges and these steep cliffs make it hard to get to the top but as you are shooting down they make it hard to shoot at the people directly below you as well. This is what would eventually force the Confederates off the ridges around the city and would allow the Union to win the battle.

More Pictures: All images are by the author ask permission if you want to use them, and if you do make sure you give me credit.

Further Reading:
University of Tennessee Chattanooga (UTC) site on the outcrops of the area.
Another piece by UTC on the geology visible from Lookout Mountain. (PDF)
If you want to learn more about the history of the site visit the NPS page.

National Park Service Series Page

Why SOPA is bad

So I wanted to get another non-video post up before I posted more videos but this video is too important. I know I normally don't post about political issues but SOPA and PIPA will kill the internet as we know it and will make blogs almost impossible to exist so please watch and do what you can to make sure these bills not only die buy don't come back, although they probably will.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History

See I told you I would put a real post together before I posted another video. I am also changing the way I do these, since I now have a separate page linking to all of the museum posts I figured I would start just titling the museum posts the name of the museum. So I guess if you were confused this would be under the old title scheme Museum Visit #5. Enough with the housekeeping stuff lets move on to the actual review.

Let me start by saying that while I may have included several images in this post [image to right is of Dippy outside the museum, obviously it had snowed, and as always all images are by the author ask for permission if you wish to use them] if you head over to Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings blog he has several posts dedicated to the museum, I will link to all of them at the bottom of the post, so make sure you head over there and be warned there may be more added over the next few days/weeks. Needing to look at some other specimens for my research I had contacted Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CM) (Wikipedia page) to get a chance to look at some of their specimens. Once I had finished my research I took some time too look through the museum itself but as my time was short, and I wanted to beat rush hour home, I did a quicker trip through the museum than I normally would have. With that said this is the museum I grew up going to, being from the Pittsburgh region, so I know a lot of the permanent exhibits really well, and I spent plenty of time in the dinosaur hall anyway.

This history of this museum is the history of Pittsburgh in a nutshell. The museum is located in the Oakland region of the city sandwiched between two of the local colleges, the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and has several other colleges close by. The museum building actually houses two museums, the museum of natural history and the museum of art (Wikipedia page), and a branch of the Carnegie Library (Wikipedia page) system for the city. The building and the 3 main things in it were gifted to the city by, shockingly, Andrew Carnegie who had basically built the city through his steel industry and wanted, or as he felt needed, to give back to the people of the city so he gifted the museum and a huge library system to the city to pay it back. The fossils within the great dinosaur hall Carnegie had bought specifically to fill the hall with what, at the time, were the great new finds of prehistoric beasts coming out of the western U.S.. While he did not acquire as many as the American Museum of Natural History (Wikipedia page) in New York or the Smithsonian (Wikipedia page) in Washington, D.C. he managed to have a great many finds come to Pittsburgh. Many of these finds were completely new genus and species and one Apatosaurus louisae was named after Carnegie's wife while one dinosaur was named after him as well, Diplodocus carnegii. The museum was amazing when it was first finished and it represented the wealth that was the city and the power that it held when steel was made there. Very little changed in the museum for many years and as jobs and influence moved from the cities the dinosaurs in the hall continued to look more and more out of date as they were set up in a way that we thought dinosaurs were during the early to middle 20th century. During the late 1990's and early 2000's thanks in part to growing influence of the medical field, a lot coming out of Pitt, and a growth in technology, a lot of which came out of CMU, the region started to see renewed growth in jobs and people. Around the same time CM decided their dinosaurs were out of date and set off on a multi-year project to update them. This meant closing the dinosaur hall down and remaking the whole thing. I remember seeing the dinosaurs in the old style and was upset when they said they were going to close the hall down but seeing the finished project it was well worth it [Image to the left and above of the new hall]. You can see why I said the history of the museum follow that of the city pretty well though now hopefully, also that was far longer than I wanted it to be whoops.

Walking into the museum you get the feel that you are walking back in time, not quite to the time of the dinosaurs but at least to the time of Andrew Carnegie, the marble that surrounds the interior of the natural history entrance is impressive and shortly after paying admission there are many open rooms that have artifacts from Ancient Greece and Rome. This was early 20th century decadence at its best in a museum for the people. The cost to get in is not cheap, $17.95 for an adult, but trust me it is worth it, I should note that if you are a member or a member of several other museums you can get in for cheaper or even free. Now you are going to have to walk past the gift shop and unless you want to carry around your gift with you all day I would try to hold off till the end of the day, although they do have plenty of fun/cool stuff in there.

I am going to treat the museum as unidirectional and in reality there are plenty of ways to explore the museum and you can explore it however you want but the museum is kind of set up to be viewed in the way I am going about it [Image at right is of the fighting T. rex's]. Continuing forward you will enter into a smaller hall, this one gives you a very basic primer of geology. There are displays talking about such varied things as oil and natural gas, this was built before the big natural gas push in the northeast as well, to coal as well as just talking about general rock types and fossils. There are also several displays talking about the local geology and why the local geography is the way it is. The coolest thing in this room is the "elevator", I forget what their name for it is, that "takes you under the museum" to see the rocks. While it takes you down the guide talks about the geology of the area and about more general geologic situations such as it getting warmer the further down you go. The final thing you might notice as you walk out is a display of the what the area looked like during the Pennsylvanian, it was swampy, and includes some of the plants and animals known from that time period, this was also put together before the discovery of Fedexia striegeli so that is not included.

As you move on you may be tempted to speed ahead into the dinosaur hall but those doors are there for a reason, turn right to go see the impressive mineral collection. This also used to be not as well put together but when they redid the dinosaur hall they redid this as well. I don't know if it is as large as the one at the Houston Museum but it is put together in a more modern way and just seems a little more interesting. The problem with it is that it is just too big and I doubt many kids are going to have the patience to walk though/look at all of the mineral after all they just saw a glimpse of the dinosaurs. One more thing to see before you enter the dinosaur hall is right across from the minerals is a large glass faced room. If you are lucky you may be able to catch paleontologists in there working on dinosaur bones so it is pretty cool especially for the budding paleontologists in your group.

Walking into the dinosaur hall is an experience in and of itself [Image to left is of the doors to the entrance to the dinosaur hall with a Herrerasaurus in front of it]. We have all seen museums that are dark and dingy and all they have on display are the dinosaur fossils themselves. Walking into CM's dinosaur hall you are immediately hit with how bright it is, most of which is done with skylights in the roof. On the walls are vast paintings making the skeletons on display part of the ecosystem from which they came. The room is divided up into the three periods that made up the Mesozoic. In the Triassic portion a phytosaur, Redondasaurus bermani, skeleton on display hunts or is at least annoyed by a small group of early theropod dinosaurs, Coelophysis bauri, representing animals found in the Chinle Group of New Mexico and Arizona, although this is about the same age as the Dockum in West Texas. There is also a display on the more "local" Triassic finds from the rift basins of the east coast from North Carolina up through Connecticut which you can read more about in a book I reviewed in the past. Many of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic section were unearthed in what is now Dinosaur National Monument (Wikipedia page) so there is a display on that. The museum then shows its classic sauropods against a beautiful background that includes some rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs and in a display that includes footprints. There is also in this section a small collection of fossils from Solnhofen Formation of Germany which were donated to the museum by Bayet in 1903. Finally you enter the Cretaceous which consists of 2 Tyrannosaurus rexs fighting over a kill while a Quetzalcoatlus flies overhead. Finally there is a smaller room that shows off some of the Cretaceous interior seaway animals that have been found from places like the Niobrara of Kansas. From here there is a stairwell to go up and view the exhibits from above which is well worth taking the time to do as this is a view you typically don't get a most museums. There are lots of smaller displays which I did not talk about, sorry I could keep going for a while, but I did want to mention two other things. Most of the big displays have computer monitors that you can touch and find out more information. One of the things you can learn is just how much of the skeleton you are looking at is real and you will find that most of the skeletons on display are mostly real which is pretty cool to see. The other thing I wanted to point out is that if a specimen was the first of its species to be named it is known as a type specimen and these are displayed prominently throughout the hall whenever there is a type specimen on display, and trust me there are a lot of them.

Moving from the dinosaur hall we next move onto the Cenozoic area [Image at right is of the ground sloth Paramylodon harlani]. This area is one of the few areas of the museum itself that I have complaints about. Maybe it is because my wife studies prehistoric mammals or maybe it is just my love of all things paleontology but I find this area to be a little disappointing. There are only a few specimens on display although the main ones separate from the kids area are very well done. There is a little area where kids can "dig" for fossils and while I love this idea the way they set up a lot of the mammal fossils around the outer edge can make them hard to get to or see. This is especially true if the pit is closed or if there are kids digging in the pit and you don't want to risk stepping on them. I think this is the area that needs to currently be redone the most move the specimens out where they can better be displayed and seen also bring up some more fossils from collections so we can get a more diverse showing. This is a time that most people forget about and there were plenty of interesting animals that lived then too so lets show them off as well.

The next exhibit area is upstairs and consists of stuffed/taxidermied animals from all around the world. These are really well done and while they show there age in that a museum built today probably wouldn't have as many they are in really good shape. The animals are also not just lifeless animals but have realistic backgrounds to where they come from, again complete with footprints, and seem to be really alive now. There are plenty of animals from Africa and North America primarily but a few Asian and South American animals also make an appearance. Prior to the Pittsburgh Zoo (Wikipedia page), which is great as well, becoming as good as it is this would likely have been the only place people would have seen animals in their more natural environment. When originally built the zoo was nothing more than steel cages and concrete floors, and trust me it has come a long way from that, so the animals in no way looked natural or at home but you could see that at the museum.

There are two other main exhibits that are worth checking out but I won't go into too much detail here. There is an exhibit on Ancient Egypt which has some cool displays and specimens from there. There is also an exhibit on some of the native people from closer to the Arctic Circle. This is probably the only place I have been to that has an exhibit on them so it is interesting to compare with the more southern Native Americans. The final thing to check out is a little explore area. This area has lots of things for kids to do and gives them a chance to learn about science and to touch things like animals pelts and the like.

I love this museum but I am sure I am a little biased. It is definitely worth the price of admission and you will spend the better part of the day there. If you have some time you admission will also get you a chance to go see the art museum, and you might want to because you are also likely paying for parking which can be expensive but kind of has to be to discourage people from parking there for work/school. My only complaint about the museum itself is the size/set up of the Cenozoic mammal portion but I do have one other complaint so hear me out. The museum does have a little restaurant area, which is nice considering some museums like Panhandle Plains don't even have one at all and the one in Houston is just a McDonald's, but the food overall is sub-par and expensive for what you get. Although I will recommend that you get the dinosaur smiley cookies they are from Eat 'n Park which is a local chain that has great cookies so these are just as good plus they are dinosaur shaped what's not to love!

Museum visits page

Links to Dave Hone's posts are below the fold