Drought and Climate Change

Another great video by Greenman3610 talking about how climate change is effecting the drought that is destroying agriculture in much of Texas right now.

Big Bend National Park

Location: Western Texas in Southernmost Brewster County along the border with Mexico.

Introduction:
I have been wanting to do a post on Big Bend for a long time, mainly because most of my fellow paleontology graduate students were doing work on material from here, but I couldn't put a post together till I had been there [Image at top looking out the Window in the Chisos by author]. Finally as I was getting ready to leave Lubbock I convinced one of the other students to drive out there with me for a couple of days so I can now say I have been even if we played tourist at the end of July and were trying not to melt the whole time we were there (note: it is hot in the desert in July).

Big Bend National Park (Wikipedia page) is not a national park that you just happen upon you have to make the conscious effort to get there. The fact is even the county it is in is off most peoples beaten path, there are no interstates that go through the county, and with a population of ~10,000 people very few people will ever visit the area. Big Bend is also in the middle of a desert which most people tend to avoid, especially during the hot summers which also happen to be when most tourists visit the other national parks. All of these reasons make Big Bend one of the least visited of the parks in the NPS system.

I mentioned that Big Bend is in the desert and it is part of the Chihuahuan Desert this desert extends up into New Mexico in fact 2 previous national park series posts, Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad, have talked about parks in this desert. Now this is not the desert that most people picture when they think desert, there are no big cacti and tons of sand. What there is instead is a very dry environment with for the most part low growing plants that have adapted to be able to live with little to no water for extended periods of time and when they do get water they make the most of it. There is plenty of mesquite as well with its long roots that reach deep for water and can find water in even the driest of environments. But there is more than just desert as the park varies from 1800 feet up to over 7000 feet there is a wide range of climatic differences. The Rio Grande and its flood plain make of a rich fertile wet soil that keeps plants growing almost year round and in the valley actually makes it quite humid. The desert has two ranges one the high desert and the other the low desert both have unique and varying vegetation types. And finally the Chisos Mountains that extend from the desert floor reaching up to the sky, the basin in them where the campsites are is over a mile high, the micro-climate here is cooler, I woke up in the morning actually cold and wanted to put on a long sleeve shirt, and more wet than the surrounding area and is the only place in the park where true trees can and do grow, also home to bears and mountain lions.

Ok I have rambled on long enough with the intro but lets just say if you happen to be nearby for whatever reason go visit Big Bend it is worth your time.

Geology:
This park is so large (~800,000 acres) and has such a vast diverse geologic history that this is really only going to be an extremely brief summary of the geology of the park because I could ramble on for a long time about it [Image at left of Santa Elena Canyon by author].

In the Triassic while Pangaea was still around this area of the country was exposed to the surface so unlike good chunks of the rest of the state there are no Triassic rocks in Big Bend. During the Triassic and Jurassic, however, Pangaea began to break apart this caused many of the rift valleys on the east coast of the United States and slowly started to allow for subsidence of the middle portion of the country. By the Cretaceous a large body of salt water that connected the still forming Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, this was known as the Western Interior Seaway. This seaway was shallow and warm which is the perfect conditions for calcium carbonate secreting organisms to live in and these organisms form limestone deposits, see Guads, Carlsbad, and Mammoth Cave posts. These limestone deposits form the famous Glen Rose Formation in most of Texas along with most of the other limestone formations in the center of the state, they also form the limestone and chalk formations up into Kansas where the less famous, but equally important, Niobrara Chalk is. In the park there are thin bands of the Glen Rose but the most obvious example of this limestone is the massive limestone cut by the Rio Grande to form Santa Elena Canyon.

Late in the Cretaceous the sea level fell and the Western Interior Seaway began to recede toward the Gulf of Mexico, in the U.S. at least. As the sea level dropped river systems began to flow through the region and toward the very end of the Cretaceous portions of the park where underwater and portions where on land. During this time many dinosaurs lived in the area and in the formations that represent this time we find their fossils. The dinosaurs weren't alone during this time as the pterosaurs had grown to their largest size yet and Big Bend represents the type location of one of the largest the ~10 meter wing spanned Quetzalcoatlus northropi (Wikipedia page). The actual contact that represents the end of the dinosaurs, that famous iridium layer, is not found in the park although it should be no one has found the contact yet, although we are still looking.

Whatever happened to the contact the area continued on being a warm wet swampy habitat through a good portion of the Eocene, fossils from the mammals that lived at this time can be seen at a roadside stop known as the Fossil Bone Exhibit in the park [photo at right of the Eocene sedimentary rocks near the fossil bone exhibit by author]. These animals were sitting on a ticking time bomb, however, because while they were living here under their feet were building up massive igneous intrusions.

These igneous rocks would eventually burst through eventually and would form the Chisos Mountains. There were likely at least 3 major events of eruption and evidence throughout the park is obvious. In an area known as Tuff Canyon, tuff is a type of volcanic ash, there are ash rocks that have been heavily cut by water but in the ash layers there are evidence of lahars and lava bombs. Eventually the composition of the magma changed and it came out more runny this formed areas where you have lava being deposited on top of ash and they are exposed for many meters in elevation. The igneous rocks shaped the park and through the area there is evidence of volcanics but also plenty of evidence of intrusives as igneous dikes cross roads in several places.

Volcanism eventually stopped and the area settled tectonically but it wasn't quite done yet. As with the Guads there was at least one period of uplift formed as the western edge of the Basin and Range that uplifted many of the rocks and with the help of erosion giving us the geography we have now. The park has obviously also become a desert and this likely occurred closer to the end of the last ice age as climates every fluxed due to the change in flow patterns caused by the loss of the glaciers.

More Pictures: I have even more pictures in the Big Bend portion of my Flickr page, all photos by author.


More "runny" volcanic rocks on top of an ash layer.


Cretaceous aged sedimentary rocks


Roadrunner


Welcome to Big Bend National Park

Further Reading:

The NPS pages on the Geology of Big Bend and the Fossils of Big Bend, as well as all the links included in the fossil page.

Long and very technical USGS Circular 1327: Geological, Geochemical, and Geophysical Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey in Big Bend National Park, Texas from 2008, from that link you can download the whole thing.

See many of the papers by Dr. Tom Lehman at Texas Tech University, and if you walk through the second floor of the building near his office you will see other posters and papers of his and his students research.

National Park Service Series homepage

Museum Visit #4

It had been a while since I had been to a museum so when one of my fellow graduate students suggested making a trip to Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum (Wikipedia article) I jumped on the opportunity. He had the option to make the trip a couple of months ago but had decided not to go but back then I had done some research on the museum which made the decision to go even easier when he asked. So early on the morning of May 14th a group of us set off from Lubbock, TX to take the hour and forty-five to two hour trip up to Canyon, TX to the museum.

This museum claims to be the largest history museum in the state of Texas and I would not doubt that it is for a second. This is a pretty impressive for a state that is as obsessed with its history as Texas is. The museum is deceivingly large looking small on the outside and located on the campus of West Texas A&M University in a fairly small town outside of Amarillo, TX. The main focus of the museum is on the Panhandle of Texas.

Walking into the museum you get a taste of what you are going to see in the lobby. There is a small display on Native Americans from the region a small paleontology section and a small display on history of European Settlers in the region. It cost about $10 to get in but it was well worth the price.

The first hall we walked through talked about the Native Americans that lived in the area. There were plenty of artifacts used by Native Americans to farm as well as gather and hold water and other important aspects to life. The exhibit was set up based on three aspects for living in the area, which for some reason I can't remember right now, but included things like food water and shelter, for this reason the Native American artifacts were scattered throughout the area. There is a very brief discussion on why farming is possible in the area, pumping water from the Ogallala Aquifer, and some of the harm we are doing to the aquifer by farming using it. While this historical portion is interesting it was actually the reason we went nor is it what I am going to focus on now.

Entering into the paleontology section you are greeted by a large mural with 3 casts in front of it. These represent the panhandle during the age of mammals, I am not sure specifically sorry you get the generic title there, and include a three-toed horse as well as a Gomphothere. There is then a quick summary of life through time starting in the Cambrian and moving through the Permian, in other words the Paleozoic. Each time section has fossils that represent organisms found during those time periods, most of these are small invertebrates and since these times are poorly represented or not represented at all in Texas they are just kind of glanced over. Entering into the Permian there are many fossils that have been found in not just Texas but in the panhandle.

Now is a good time to point out that many of the actual fossils in the museum from the panhandle were found during the 30's and 40's by Works Progress Administration (WPA) digs. These digs were "shovel-ready" jobs that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised just to give people jobs so they had money so they could spend said money to improve the economy. Many of these fossils came from nearby Palo Duro Canyon State Park (Wikipedia article, and tourist page) which is why they are stored in Canyon, TX. With as many Permian rocks as are in the State Park the Permian fossils are under represented. Part of this is because while Permian fossils are well known from the state they are actually very poorly represented in the Quartermaster Formation, the Permian aged rocks in the state park.

The Triassic fossils do not suffer the same fate. This is because the Triassic is represented by the Dockum Group which in the Panhandle has produced plenty of fossils and still does today, this is the work that the Museum of Texas Tech University Paleontology Division (MoTTU-P) focuses on. So there are plenty of phytosaurs and metoposaurs on display in the Panhandle-Plains Museum. The remainder of the Mesozoic is underrepresented in the Panhandle (there is some Cretaceous aged rock on the South to Southeastern edge of the caprock) so there are very few fossils on display from the Jurassic and Cretaceous. They did have some sauropod fossils, likely casts, as well as a few other Mesozoic casts including the centerpiece of the paleontology wing a cast of Allosaurus. The one area that did anger me was they had the sauropod fossils labeled as "Brontosaurus", for those who don't know "Brontosaurs" has long since been synonomized with Apatosaurus (go type Brontosaurus into Wikipedia), this set out a minor moment of rage, the fact that the skull was of a Diplodocid didn't help much.

But a major portion of the Paleontology exhibit focused on the fossil mammals that had been found in the area. The panhandle is home to three North American Land Mammal Ages (NALMA); Clarendonian, Hemphillian, and Blancan. These were where many of the fossils were from and there was case after case of fossils from these ages. I can tell that the exhibit hadn't been updated in a while because many of the genus and species names are outdated and have been synonomized with others, I discuss this on the appropriate images in my Flickr set on the museum. I was impressed by this massive display of mammal fossils because this is not typically what you see at most museums but if this is what they have the most of why not. They also had a display talking about horse evolution something which is impressive for West Texas.

Moving on from the fossils there is a brief overview of the geology of Palo Duro Canyon, something which I am planning a post on since we went there right after the museum. There is then a display on windmills, if you really want to see something on that come down to Lubbock and go to the American Wind Power Center (Wikipedia article), and old cars. The second floor had lots of guns, up through the better part of the Cold War, then a discussion on oil drilling, saddles, and lots of art. The basement had a few hidden gems including taxidermy displays of animals that live or used to live in the area. We did not get to see Pioneer Town because it was being renovated.

Despite its few faults the museum is worth stopping by for anyone in the South Plains and if you are in the area for any reason it is worth stopping by. We got there around 10am and left the museum at 2pm so make sure to leave plenty of time. I also took over 600 pictures, mostly because I am a huge nerd, but make sure you are ready to take lots of pictures. I think the museum gets forgotten about by people who go to Palo Duro State Park but they should really take the time to go see the museum. Sorry this post ended up being so long but when I see a hidden gem I want to make sure other people notice it as well. All images included in the post were taken by the author and if you wish to see more you can go to my Flickr set on the museum or for pictures that include those from Palo Duro my Flickr set that includes both.



Museum visits page

Creationism and Evolution in Public Schools

The Secular Student Society at Texas Tech (yes the website is out of date come on now guys) [prior post about them] is hosting an event that has been the focus of many posts on this blog, Creationism and Evolution in Public Schools. This event will be a talk by Dr. Michael Dini a professor of Biology, more specifically Biology Education, at Texas Tech University and will start on Monday April 11 at 8:00 pm in Holden Hall Room 150. This should be an interesting event because Texas has in the past been openly hostile to evolution and Lubbock is one of the more conservative cities in the country. I will be there and if this is a topic that interests you at all you should be there as well you are more than welcome.

National Parks and Funding

This will probably one of the few posts where I will discuss politics but I will try to remain as neutral as possible but we all have to acknowledge that most things we read do have some sort of bias especially when it comes to things like the federal budget so I apologize in advance. If you have been following this blog for any length of time you probably have a good idea of how I feel about the National Park System here in the United States. If you are new here or have just missed it lets just say I started a series discussing the National Parks I visit for a reason. This is why on Tuesday, March 29th, when I picked up the Texas Tech school paper, the Daily Toreador (DT), and saw an opinion piece advocating for no cuts to the National Park Service budget. The article is well written, for an opinion article in a college paper, and expresses a lot of my views on the subject.

People from around the world visit America’s national parks for a multitude of reasons. The parks offer unparalleled natural beauty, outstanding recreational activities, important historical preservation and education, and both mental and physical health improvement opportunities. Appropriating adequate funding to the national parks is essential to continue offering this to all Americans.

I was happy to see something like this in the school paper but I was soon to be disappointed. The following day, Wednesday March 30th, I picked up the school paper again and when I got to the opinion page saw this letter to the editor. I was seriously disappointed by what the author had to say because he seemed to be drastically misinformed. So I am going to try to destruct a lot of his argument, let me make sure to preface this by saying my economic background is lacking and there will be a lot of statements from personal experience that may not apply to everyone but I feel that these will work best for the arguments that he makes. So lets get started shall we.

While the author looks at the benefits of national parks, he fails to realize what the costs are. The budget for national parks is close to $3 billion. However, if you look at the budget for the department that oversees national parks (Department of Interior), its budget authority for 2011 is $18 billion.

$3 billion may sound like a lot of money but even when you compare it to the whole $18 billion for the Department of the Interior (DOI) that is really a small percentage. But let's expand this out, according to the New York Times, click the link for a really cool way to see where your money goes, the Federal Budget for 2010 was $3.60 trillion and President Obama's plan for 2011 is $3.69 trillion. So what does this mean? It means that if we cut all funding to the NPS you wouldn't see a change in either of those numbers. So how much percentage wise are we talking about, less than 1% of the federal budget for 2010 and in fact is less that 0.1% of the total budget. So we really won't save that much money if we cut the NPS out entirely.

Instead of spending money trying to conserve land and national resources, I would feel better auctioning off government-owned land, national parks and other resources. The federal government owns nearly 30 percent, or 650 million acres, of the United States.

Another solution proposed by Dr. Walter E. Williams of George Mason University is allowing people to exchange future Social Security benefits for government-owned land.

I included these two paragraphs together because lets face it they are arguing for the same thing. So his problem isn't with the NPS it is with the DOI, whose total operating budget is still less than 1% of the entire US Budget. These federal owned land which he feels should be sold include the National Parks but a far larger percentage of them belong to National Forests and National Grasslands, with some other land uses being by the BLM and Indian Reservations among others. National Forests and Grasslands are far from being just protected land they are land that the government allows for private use of. They do this by allowing logging and cattle grazing in these lands. Wait what? Yes that is right these lands can be used by private companies/individuals for logging and grazing but the government asks for a fee and that the land isn't overgrazed or clear cut. In order words they prevent private companies from destroying these resources for future use, so American will continue to have natural resources so we can continue to be a great country into the future, oh yeah and so we can continue to have clean drinking water.

The author also mentions how national parks can promote exercise and education. Nature is not the only place to get physical exercise. Doing an intense cardiovascular workout would burn more calories than hours at a national park.

Getting a 30 min "intense cardiovascular workout" may burn more calories in the short term, not that I am sure about this fact, but long hikes can build up endurance which means that you will have a better metabolism and be able to burn more calories sitting watching TV at the end of the day than if you just went to the gym. Also I feel the author has never hiked up a trail that included 2,000+ feet of elevation change over ~4 miles starting at ~1 mile above sea level, I loved the Guads, because trust me you are burning a ton of calories no matter who you are.

Now this next statement really got to me:

As for education, if people really wanted to get an understanding of history, they could spend an afternoon at the library or do online research.

I can read about Gettysburg all I want, I can hear that the Confederates had to cross a mile of open field, uphill, till the cows come home, but until you are standing at the Confederate position in Gettysburg and you see how impossible it really was. You can "learn" history from books but you don't really know history till you can experience it yourself, see it for yourself. This also neglects the fact that many of these historical locations saw the deaths of thousands of American soldiers many of them were never identified and were buried in mass graves which are often lost to history. The only thing we know about these graves is that they were on the battlefields, these battlefields serve as reminders as well as graveyards. The Civil War battlefields of the east especially those around Washington D.C. have already been built up around and we have lost portions of history forever and we need it to stop.

I am not going to address his last two paragraphs as they are purely political and I don't want to get into these statements here. Some other arguments have thankfully been put forth in a letter to the editor of the DT today, Friday April 1st, so go read those as well. Also I want to admit that there are reasons that you could justify cutting some money from the NPS and DOI but none of the above are them. Let me end with words that should probably be familiar to all, well at least those from the U.S., explain the need to protect a lot of these lands from President Abraham Lincoln.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

West Texas Sustainability Conference

So I got this announcement e-mailed to me today for the West Texas Sustainability Conference being hosted by Texas Tech University on April 21, 2011. You can visit the official website for the conference and sign up if you are going to be in the area. The website says this in the overview:

This conference is focused on practical application, state of the art, and future trends for sustainability. The geographical patina is wilderness, rural, agricultural lands, and small town America, rather than large metropolitan areas. The topics for seminars will be diverse and both for general or professional interests. Major topics considered are: telecommunication, transportation, energy, water, environmental resources, environmental law, land use planning and design. This one-day conference will feature many case studies of actual projects in West Texas and the Southwest

If you are going to be in the area anyway I would suggest trying to go. I would but will be busy with class and other engagements that day. I may, if I can get some free time, go check out the farmer's market on the 22nd. I would be interesting to hear from anyone who goes about how it is. This is an important topic for the area with a decreasing amount of water in the aquifer that supplies most of the area as well as decreasing oil world wide much of which this area used to supply.

Lubbock Paleontology

When I first moved out to Lubbock, Texas I wasn't sure what I was getting myself in for. I knew that the terrain would be flat but I had also heard stories that there is nothing to do here. While I have been living out here I have found plenty of things to do, including visits to the Museum of Texas Tech and the American Windpower Center (among others) within the city and trips further west to visit several national parks. One of the places in Lubbock that came as a surprise to me was the Lubbock Lake Landmark (LLL) (Wikipedia article) [Photo at left of Short Faced Bear, Arctodus simus, statue at the LLL]. The LLL is a primarily archaeological site that shows evidence of at least 12000 years of human civilization from Clovis time to present. Well an article in today's Daily Toreador, the Texas Tech University student paper, talks about a new exhibit at the LLL that shows the animals that have been found at, or near, the site through time.

The exhibit includes surprising animals once living in Lubbock. The Hub City once was home to many exotic animals no longer found anywhere near Lubbock.

“Short-faced bears, sloths and camels all lived in Lubbock at one time or another,” [Susan] Rowe [education program manager of the LLL] said. “Many visitors are very surprised about camels once living in our area.”

I saw the exhibit a few weeks ago and while it is small it is really well done. Most of the animals they show are from the site itself but some of them have not been found on site but at a nearby site, about an hours drive, and a formation that underlies most of the landmark, the Blancan Formation (yes the type locality for the Blancan Land Mammal Age). Overall worth a couple of hours of your time if you are in Lubbock.

Wind Power in Oil Country

When most people think of west Texas they think of oil. The southern high plains and areas nearby have long produced many barrels of oil. This is largely due to the presence of the Permian Basin that made this area a rich area at one time. In recent times oil production has decreased as the peak oil for this area has long since been removed. This has led to an economic depression of sorts in cities such as Midland/Odessa and surrounding areas. But some of this is starting to change.

In the mid-1800s when farmers first started settling the southern high plains a major problem to agriculture in this area is the lack of water. At some point in time water was discovered in the Ogallala Aquifer in the rocks making up the Ogallala fromation as well as some of the underlying Cretaceous rocks. This water would allow farmers to grow plants that would not normally have naturally grown. In order to get this water up from the deep the water needed to be pumped up from these depths. To accomplish this task windmills, like the one at left [photo at left of a windmill at the National Ranching Heritage Center (Wikipedia article) in Lubbock, Texas from ~1898 taken by author], were built that would use the naturally occurring high winds in this area to pump the water up (as someone who has living out on the southern high plains trust me the wind is almost always blowing).

Wind is continuing to serve the southern high plains today. With the decline in oil the future in energy is starting to move toward alternative fuels. In Lubbock there is a place known as the American Wind Power Center (Wikipedia article) which showcases the past present and future in wind power. In the wind power center they have a fully functioning moder windmill. Often times these modern windmills are accused of being loud but as you can see in the video I posted to YouTube earlier today is that the windmill itself is quieter than the wind itself. Most of sound that the windmill itself produced could not be heard until right next to it. What is more is that the farmers whose land is being used to put up many of these wind farms enjoy having them, just as they enjoyed having the oil wells before. The footprints of the wind farms are less than those of the oil fields before them and also give the farmers subsidies that are on par with or larger than their subsidies from the oil companies. And after the initial construction of the windmills farmers can continuing farming the land as they were before. All of these things contribute to making west Texas the wind power capital of the U.S.



As with oil before it the future of American power rests in west Texas!

The Texas Governor Candidates stance on Evolution

The San Angelo Standard Times has an article out that discusses the two governor candidates views on education, I recommend that everyone voting in the next governor's election should read it. Most of what they say is pretty standard stuff that governor candidates will say during an election year about education. You know stuff like, "Public education will remain a priority." The distinction comes when both candidates were asked about their views on evolution. As PZ pointed out Governor Perry says this:

I am a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect, and I believe it should be presented in schools alongside the theories of evolution. The State Board of Education has been charged with the task of adopting curriculum requirements for Texas public schools and recently adopted guidelines that call for the examination of all sides of a scientific theory, which will encourage critical thinking in our students, an essential learning skill.

Governor ID and creationism aren't allowed to be taught in science class in the USA due to violation of the 1st amendment's separation of church and state. Don't believe me see Kitzmiller v Dover.

Bill White, the Democratic nominee, is less straight forward with his answer:

Educators and local school officials, not the governor, should determine science curriculum.

While I don't disagree with his stance in saying the governor should stay out, that is after all not in their job description, but the question didn't ask for what he thinks about evolution. I know he is a rational person and in the state of Texas saying the wrong thing about evolution can be the difference between getting elected and not so I am sure he said the right thing politically but I would like to see someone in politics in this state say what they really think about evolution.

Wait someone has, and they are running for school board no less. Rebecca Bell-Metereau has actual experience teaching as well. You can vote for her to get some money from the Democrats here.

New Creationist "Museum"

There are several creationist "museums" spread throughout the country, the most famous of which is the one in Kentucky. What might surprise people is the number in Texas. I know when I think of Texas I think of a state that is very much a part of the "Christian Right". This isn't completely accurate yes it is in the top 10 for the importance of religion it is actually tied for 10th with Kentucky, as of 2008 (source). There are 2 creationist museums within the state of Texas that are open right now. The most famous of the two is the Creationist Evidence Museum in Glen Rose (Official Site). The other one is the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum in Crosbyton (Official Site), which I have mentioned before. Neither of these, however, are within a major metropolitan area, the Creationist Evidence Museum in Glen Rose is the closest but it is still a fair trip from the Dallas-Fort Worth Area to Glen Rose. Well it appears that a new one is about to open up within Dallas itself.



I have actually known about this for about 6 months or so and would like to point out that they have had the same status on their webpage for that whole time so I don't know how much progress they are making. I obviously would prefer if they don't build this because it perverts science and outright lies to people but it is perfectly within their rights to build it. If it is anything like the one they have in Arkansas (Official Site) they will be using the same creationist arguments that have been tried and refuted for the past 20+ years.

Museum Visit #3

Last Friday, September 3, I finally made a trip to go actually walk around the Museum of Texas Tech University (MoTTU) (Official website, Wikipedia article). The museum was open late due to being a part of the First Friday Art Trail here in Lubbock. It was nice to walk around the museum again. The museum itself is small kind of what you would expect from a museum on a university campus, in case you didn't catch on it is at Texas Tech University. The museum has full time exhibits dedicated to Lubbock history, Mesozoic life, and African art. There are also several exhibits that get replaced off and on through out the year. One of these that is running for a little while deals with pterosaurs and one of my fellow graduate students telling me about this is actually why I went. I am primarily going to focus on the Paleontology hall with maybe a slight mention on the Pterosaur exhibit.

The Paleontology Hall talks about changes in life through time. Starting with a brief exhibit on some of the first dinosaurs and talking about what paleontology is. The exhibit continues into the Triassic. Lubbock and Texas Tech are a hotbed of research in the Triassic Period due to the proximity to the Triassic aged Dockum Group. There are casts of phytosaur skulls and a bigger exhibit with a cast of an aetosaur and Postosuchus kirkpatricki, which was originally found near the town of Post, TX (about 40 miles from Lubbock). There is also a small exhibit on the evolution of birds which includes the possible bird possible chimaera Protoavis texensis. There is also discussion of some of the dinosaurs out of Big Bend National Park (Park webpage, Wikipedia article) and then some talk of some of the early mammals found both in the Dockum as well as some from the K/T boundary of Big Bend National Park.

The pterosaur exhibit, which you will be able to view through November 7, was interesting. Dr. Sankar Chatterjee has recently been doing a heavy amount of research into pterosaurs so many of the exhibits are casts that are being worked on and studied down in the basement. The exhibit is well put together and sums up a lot of the current researching going on in the study of pterosaurs including questions of how they would have moved while on the ground as well as what is the use of the massive crests that many of the, especially later, pterosaurs posses.

Overall the Museum of Texas Tech University is worth the quick visit to go see if you are in Lubbock. Some of the areas such as the Lubbock history as well as the art exhibits will be worth seeing if you are interested in that. The museum is small so the museum really appreciates visitors from out of town but I wouldn't make a special trip to Lubbock to see it. It also needs a little updating in some areas but with as small a budget as the museum has it is very well done. If you are interested in Triassic aged organisms the MoTTU is one of the few museums that contains a large amount of Triassic fossils.

Museum visits page

Museum Visit #2

Yes I know I said that this one would be on the Museum of Texas Tech University but I haven't actually had the time to go through the museum yet so I will get back to that later.

So I was driving between San Antonio, TX and Baton Rouge, LA earlier this month. This drive is just a trip down I-10 which involves driving through Houston. So since I was driving through, and there was an exhibit that I wanted to see (more on that later), I decided I would stop at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

This is a large museum with many different portions to their exhibit but since I only had a few hours to spare I decided to focus mostly on the paleontology oriented exhibits since that is more what interests me. The main paleontology hall you walk into the standard dinosaur hall. This is what you expect to see dinosaur wise from most, a T-Rex a type of sauropod a Quetzalcoatlus (this is an interesting cast that I will discuss later) and a handful of other dinosaurs, but is still put together very well. Around the outside of this exhibit hall the exhibit shows many different fossils from different time periods and the exhibits tend to make sure to show fossils from the state of Texas.

Continuing around the exhibit you do find some mammals including a cast of an early lemur like primate jaw from Wyoming. There is also a good discussion on the evolution of the horse. Overall this is what you would expect from a mammal exhibit from a major museum, it is interesting but doesn't bring in the crowds.

I walked quickly through the Wiess Energy Hall and then I made it to the second level of the museum and walked through the gem and mineral hall and the malacology exhibit but didn't focus on either of these three due to lack of time but they are worth checking out if you go there. While on the second floor I noticed that the cast of the Quetzalcoatlus had different colored bones. There were some that were a grey to black color and were smooth in texture while there were others that were brown and looked more realistic in their texture. My best guess of what these changes in color mean is that the brown bones are casts that represent what has actually been found of Quetzalcoatlus and the rest is what we might expect to find in the future.

I then went to the exhibit that I really went there to see, the Archaeopteryx: Icon of Evolution exhibit. This is what I really wanted to go see since my current research is on a pterosaur sample that was found in the Solnhofen Limestone of Germany which is where all of these samples are from. The specimens on display here are amazing and you can see soft tissue in everything from the pterosaurs to the insects. The exhibit winds you though tons of fish and other organisms from the limestone and eventually you get to the highlight the Archaeopteryx. The exhibit does a great job of using Archaeopteryx to support the Theory of Evolution. It did such a good job I heard someone leaving clearly frustrated say, "I still don't believe we evolved 'cause of the big bang or anything." I think it put a clear ding in their armor of creationism. If you are in the Houston area go see this exhibit before it leaves town on September 6.

Having a little extra time, and not wanting to continue driving in the rain (it was a waste I got caught driving in the rain anyway), I decided to head into the Butterfly Center. I remember going here when I was a younger kid but they had updated the entrance now. You now get to see other insects before you walk in get the see the butterflies emerge from their chrysalis. They also try to teach kids that bugs aren't bad and they all do stuff that needs to be done so don't be afraid. The exhibit is well put together and the plants have grown since I was last there creating a much more foresty (is this even a word whatever I'm going with it) feel. The butterflies were all over the place which apparently they hadn't been earlier in the day but you can tell they are used to avoiding people they stayed away from anything that moves so you have to be very still to get them to land on you.

I normally wouldn't say anything about the gift shop but I don't think that I have ever been in a museum gift shop that big or one that sold that much fancy stuff, not what you would normally expect.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science is a great trip and as I said if you are in Houston before the Archaeopteryx exhibit ends go for sure. Make sure you have some time to spend because there are many different things to see and do here that make the experience worth the trip.

Museum visits page

Pterosaurs are pterosaurs

Recently a paper was published on a new pterosaur from the Dallas region of Texas (Myers, 2010). While an interesting find, I suggest you find the paper to read about it, I think the paper speaks for itself I wanted to blog about something else. I have read two different public articles about the paper and they both get it wrong.

The first one (found here) is a blog post from Scientific Blogging. Now I have stated in the past that I do enjoy the blogs on Scientific Blogging (see here, here, here, and here) but in this case they said something that made slap my own face.

The rare pterosaur — literally a winged lizard — is also one of the youngest members in the world of the family Ornithocheiridae, and only the second ornithocheirid ever documented in North America.

[emphasis mine]

Come on this is a scientific blog you are supposed to get this right. Lizards fall within the order Squamata and are more specifically within the Suborder of Lacertilia. While they are closely related to lizards, at least more so than they are to mammals, pterosaurs are not lizards. Pterosaurs are an order within the Archosaurs which actually puts them more closely related to crocodiles and dinosaurs than lizards.

So if a scientific blog can't get it right what chance do the nonscientific sources have? This next write up is from Fox News and was sent to me by my father. You don't have to get past the headline to see what is wrong with this article:

New Toothy, Flying Dino Discovered in Texas

Yes they call them dinosaurs and it gets better:

Evidence of these flying creatures has been rare in North America -- the newly identified Aetodactylus halli is only the second such dinosaur ever documented here, although toothed pterosaurs like it were common at the time elsewhere in the world.

Argh, come on people. While yes both dinosaurs and pterosaurs are members of Ornithodira they differ from there in many ways, not going to go in depth here because it would take to long, and some scientists say they shouldn't even be related this far down. This particular paragraph also makes it seem that pterosaurs, or worse yet dinosaurs, are rare in North America. If you read the actual paper neither one of those statements are what is argued in fact it they are just arguing that the ornithocheirid pterosaurs are rare in North America, in fact this is the second one of that clade found in North America. If they are arguing that dinosaurs are rare in Texas they are also wrong, also see Jacobs (1995).

So what conclusion can we draw from this? Scientists need to make sure that when interviewed we make sure to stress things like pterosaurs are not dinosaurs or lizards. We also need to make sure we do educated the general public when given the chance to point out things like this, because I am sure that most kids could tell you that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs nor are they lizards so we need to make sure we keep stressing this!

Sources

JACOBS, L. 1995. Lone Star Dinosaurs. Texas A& M University Press, College Station, 160 p.

MYERS, T. S. 2010. A new ornithocheirid pterosaur from the upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian-Turonian) Eagle Ford group of Texas. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30(1):280-287.

Satire at its finest

So while trying to accomplish the general truck load of stuff you have to accomplish at the end of every semester add too that trying to get Thesis proposals finalized I have found very little time to do much else. So I daily take a coffee break and read the school newspaper, as I am sure you have figured out by now. Well today I came across this article and while I recommend you read the whole thing let me point out one section that really got my attention, let me preface this by saying that for the whole month of April we are supposed to get 1.29 inches of rain and as of writing this article we had received 4.56 inches and most of that was over a 4 day period (source):

Thirdly, they proclaim the rest of the civilized world has it. Clearly not, as Lubbock has not implemented them.

One Lubbock resident obviously disagrees as well. “Real American cities don’t need such tomfoolery like science on our roads. The internal combustion engine in my Hummer, powered by foreign liquids found under the Earth’s crust only needs a flat stretch of formulated asphalt to work. Science has its place: where I’m not.”

I’m also skeptical. Anything that uses the laws of physics to move water from a dangerous spot to a basin seems like it could be witchcraft, which is why I call upon whoever is in charge of the Tech roads to ban these contraptions from our university’s streets. They should continue to do important things, like arresting that bicycle for not parking on a university-approved bike rack, regardless if there are no open spots or ticketing that car that has been parked in the 30-minute zone for 32 minutes.

I was still unsure, although I was leaning toward it being, if it was satire or not till I reached this point. After reading this it took everything in me to not just start cracking up. This is how a lot of America feels and that is what makes this funny. This opinion has been taken on publicly by Gov. Sarah Palin when she was addressing global climate change and said that we [Americans] don't need, "this snake oil science stuff" (source).

Satire at its best should make us think about ourselves and our surroundings but do so in a slightly funny way that points out how funny some of what we believe actually is. Unfortunately many people become so ingrained with a belief system that even when you point out some of the more ridiculous parts of it, and every system has them, people accuse you of trying to offend them. I don't know that this piece was aimed at the right audience some will get it some won't for sure but the people who will see it probably won't get that it isn't just saying that we need drainage here in Lubbock, we do, but will miss the broader point he is trying to make. I agree this is far from a great piece of literature that will be studied for years to come but the point still comes across pretty darn well.

For a good satirical YouTuber who angers a lot of Christians go here!

Under God in the Pledge

So while reading the school paper yesterday I came across an opinion article written by one of the more liberal writers for the paper (typically the antithesis of Mr. Long). Well apparently in West Texas even the liberals are pretty freaking conservative. The article (found here) discusses why the "under God" portion of the pledge should not be removed. Originally I was going to break this down point by point but the commenters on the article did it pretty well already so I will just address one thing that drew my ire more than the rest. After discussing how the pledge was originally written to be used by any country that wanted it he says this:

Still, identifying with Christian beliefs myself, I’m sure some of you who do not are saying, “Well of course you see it that way.” My response to those people is quite simple: At any time you are free to leave the United States.

Despite my religious views or those of the next man, I think some have failed to realize this isn’t an issue of religion; it’s an issue of patriotism. The pledge was not designed to pay tribute to God or any other higher power. It was adopted with the intentions of its use being to express pride and support of our country. When the pledge is said, we face a flag, not an alter [sic].

This issue is far from an issue of patriotism. I love this country and am always grateful to those who have sacrificed so I can live here in peace and drink excess of coffee and do what I want, to a certain extent obviously. But your God and my God may very well difference this country was founded on freedom of religion (regardless of what the Texas School Board thinks). In fact the First Amendment to the Constitution in what we call the Bill of Rights says this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;[...]

There have been court cases to back this up since then including Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687 (1994) in which the Justice David Souter when writing the opinion of the majority said, "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion." Even as recently as 2007 court cases have supported this, see Inouye v Kemna. So Mr. Irby if you would prefer to live in a country that has an established religion then you are currently living in the wrong one. This is a democracy as you point out but we have rules in place to prevent:

Nor should a country founded on the basis of democracy be made to deny the wishes of the majority given that accommodating these wishes hurts no one, but denying them is in essence denying our country’s foundation and principles upon which it was built.

We have these rules to prevent this majority or mob rule from interfering on the rights of the minorities!

Private Fossil Collections

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

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

Part of one (here):

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

Second one (here):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(source)

Do you even know what you are talking about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop Politicising our class rooms

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



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

Really Mr. Long, Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it continues

So PZ kind of mentions this article briefly in one of his posts today, and that story is crazy in itself, but I figured I would say something quickly about it especially after having blogged about this very issue a couple of days ago.

So what else is there to say about this article? Well it shows what banning books can do to you. You start with just books then you get to authors then you finally mess up ban the wrong author and you say whoops but don't do anything about it. So why did they ban this author's children books?

In its haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

Ok so you banned him because of an misunderstanding...Whoops! But wait why should we ban books that are, "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system?" Shouldn't these be the types of books that we encourage students to read? Why shouldn't we know what communism was actually about or why not consult a first hand source to see how Hitler rose to power? I am not arguing that these are good ideas just that the best way to prevent things like them from happening again you have to be able to understand what they were trying to do. Although this does mean that you will have to think critically and we all know how you feel about that don't we David Bradley...I think it was something like, "This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook," yeah that's it. But wait it gets better:

Hardy said she was trusting the research of another board member, Terri Leo, R-Spring, when she made her motion and comments about Martin's writing. Leo had sent her an e-mail alerting her to Bill Martin Jr.'s listing on the Borders .com Web site as the author of Ethical Marxism. Leo's note also said she hadn't read the book.

"She said that that was what he wrote, and I said: ' ... It's a good enough reason for me to get rid of someone,' " said Hardy, who has complained vehemently about the volume of names being added to the curriculum standards.

Neither one has read the book how do you know what it says. Leo later in the article says that she didn't recommend there be a motion put forth it was more of a oh here is something interesting e-mail. So now the author of children's stories was placed on the banned authors list.

There is something called common sense use it. You should not be putting a book with explicit sexual reference in an elementary library. But why shouldn't a similar type of book be in a high school library? I mean by the time most children get to high school they know about safe sex etc...wait no this is Texas we teach abstinence only. The Texas Board of Education is not only making the state of Texas fall behind in education but they are dragging the rest of the country down with them. None of you are experts in any of these subjects, most of you are from the far religious right, listen to the experts they know what they are talking about and yes I know this goes against the "American way" of questioning authority but what you are doing is rejecting facts in place of your personal religious beliefs. If you are a voter in the state of Texas make sure that when you get the chance vote for people who use logic and reason, this includes the governor's race this spring and fall make sure you know how they feel on supporting science and reason.

Update: Sorry apparently I forgot to spell check when I published this earlier