Gray Fossil Site

Johnson City, Tennessee is not a major tourist destination and not an area that people typically go to unless they have a very specific reason for going there or are driving on I-81 between Knoxville, TN and Bristol, TN. East Tennessee State University which is located in Johnson City is also a very unassuming place that many people outside of the region have likely not heard of. But within this region sits the East Tennessee State University and General Shale Brick Natural History Museum and Visitor Center (what I will call the Gray Fossil Site from now on) (Wikipedia page)a small but impressive museum that opened its doors in 2007.

Before I get to the review of the museum let me provide a little context as to why this museum exists, and I should point out this is just a brief summary and in no way will incorporate all of the details (see a longer and more through history here on the museum's website). Sitting directly in front of the museum is Tennessee State Route 75 which makes a large arc in front of the museum, the reason for the arc and the museum are intertwined. In 2000 the state was doing road work to widen Route 75 and as anyone who has spent time in that are of the country knows there are plenty of little hills that have been cut to the the roads where they need to get to. During the widening of the road the construction workers stumbled across some fossilized remains so they called out a paleontologist to investigate. After an initial investigation Dr. Steven Wallace realized that the site was much bigger than just the small area where the road was being widened. The governor at the time Don Sundquist along with others in the state agreed that the area should be preserved so the road was moved around the site and a museum was built to house the fossils found at the site as well as to display some of the fossils and educate the public about what had been found.

Being a museum on the site of discovery makes understanding the geology of the area important. The site sits in the Ridge and Valley Geologic Providence of the United States, the basics of which I have covered before (see here and here). The Ridge and Valley is characterized by limestone based valleys surrounded by sandstone capped ridges. This site sits in one of the limestone valleys, which as I have discussed before (here and here) limestone is easily dissolved away. The dissolving of limestone, in this case, created a sinkhole during the Miocene, the age of most of the fossils in the site, which infilled with water and therefore attracted wildlife to the site. One of the most common finds at the site are tapirs which along with several other animal and plant fossils help indicate the area was heavily forested at the time. Another fossil that tells us a great deal about this portion of North America during the Miocene is the presence of alligators which indicate a much warmer environment that was is found in the region today.

The museum itself is much bigger than one might expect from the area and is quite well done inside. After walking into the main entrance and finding out why there are so few, non-avian, dinosaurs in Tennessee and none in the area there is a little seating area. This seating area has a short video presentation on the history of the site and the importance of the finds from the site. Around the video area is an amazing painting covering the wall depicting a more Miocene like environment. After watching the video the visitor then follows the path into the main display area. Here are wonderful displays of fossils that unlike the old static displays one typically thinks of with museums show an active scene. An alligator is jumping out and attacking a tapir while life continues on around them. Around the outer wall are many smaller fossils including plant fossils and animal teeth. Displays of these type of fossils were typically not put on in the museums of old but as these fossils are as important, if not more so, to the understanding of a site more and more museums are putting them on display as well. In this area you also find out about the discovery of a red panda (although from a different genus and species from the one in the link) from the site, there are now at least two known from the site, which is important to understanding the history of red pandas as well as being cool as well. The Miocene section also has multiple drawers and areas where visitors can learn more about the animals found at the site as well as what the site teaches us about the area at the time. Most of these are clearly aimed at children but that doesn't make them any less informative. The next area of the museum is a smaller area that talks about the Pleistocene of the area. While only a small amount of this comes from the site specifically much more is known from local cave sites as well as a continuing excavation of a Pleistocene sinkhole site from Saltville, Virginia. The last few rooms of the museum show what it is like to be a paleontologist, including the typical kids excavation station where kids can "dig out" fossil casts and an area that describes how a specimen is jacketed from the field and then put back together for display/continued research. The upstairs of the museum has a window that looks in on students, volunteers, and scientists who are in the process of preparing specimens for display/research from the field. There is also a window that looks in on the main reason for such a large museum, the massive collections room where specimens that have been cleaned and repaired are put into storage for future research. The room is huge and has many cabinets full of fossils that have been excavated from the area. After looking in on collections one can walk out on a short walkway that overlooks the actual site and can, during most summer days, see a field crew of students and volunteers doing an excavation of fossil remains and preserving all of the sediment in bags for future screening for potential remains that are too small to readily be noticed. The site is huge and goes down a fair distance into the sediment below which, along with continued expansion to eventually get the whole sinkhole within the property of the museum, will assure many more years of excavation and future research.

As I mentioned when I started the Gray Fossil Site is not something you will just stumble upon but I highly recommend it. The museum is large but is easy to stop through if you just happen to be heading through the region, maybe to catch a race in Bristol. I highly recommend it and it is a unique chance to learn about when alligators, tapirs, and even red pandas roamed eastern Tennessee and when the climate of the region was much different than what is experienced in the region today.

Museum visits page

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.