Happy 150th Birthday Archaeopteryx

I was hoping to have the book Archaeopteryx: Icon of Evolution by Peter Wellnhofer finished by today but as life has gotten in the way I have not been able to do that, hmm maybe I should read not that I am feeling inspired...

150 years ago today (today being 30 September 2011 and 150 years ago being 30 September 1861) an article was published by Hermann von Meyer which while only being 2 paragraphs long the first of which said this [German from the H. v. Meyer (1861) and English translation from Wellnhofer (2009)]

Nachtrüglich zu meinem Schreiben vom 15 verflossenen Monats Kann ich Ihuen nunmehr mittheilen, dass ich die Feder von Solenhofen nach allen Richtungen hin genau untersucht habe und dabei zu dem Ergebniss gekommen bin, dass sie eine wirklich Versteinerung des lithographischen Schiefers ist und vollkommen mit einer Vogel-Feder übereinstimmt. Zugleich erhalte ich von Herrn Obergerichtsrath Witte die Nachricht, dass das fast vollständige Skelet eines mit Federn bedeckten Thiers im lithographischen Schiefer gefunden worden sey. Von unseren lebenden Vögeln zeige es manche Abweichung. Die von mir untersuchie Feder werde ich mit genauer Abbildung veröffentlichen. Zur Bezeichnung des Thieres halte ich die Benennung Archaeopteryx lithographica geeignet.
[In addition to my letter of the 15th of last month I can now report that I have carefully studied the feather in all respects with the result that it is a real fossil from the lithographic shale and perfectly agrees with a bird's feather. Coincidentally I received a message from the "Obergerichtsrath" Witte that an almost complete skeleton of an animal covered with feathers was found in the lithographic shale. It showed several differences from living birds. The feather I had studied will be published along with a detailed description. For the name of the animal I consider Archaeopteryx lithographica as suitable.](emphasis mine)

Obviously there has been some confusion if the feather should be the type specimen or the fossil of the whole animal, which would eventually become the London Specimen, but the ICZN has clarified it as the animal is the type specimen so no worries anymore.

Archaeopteryx is an amazing find and even if it isn't a true bird it represents more than that. The specimens showed transitions between animals it has the feathers and many of the body parts of a bird but they are not completely bird like, it also has long claws and the teeth of the dinosaurs. This showed that dinosaurs and birds were related and while Darwin never used it as an icon for evolution it truly is one. 150 years ago paleontology was still young and we were still trying to understand what we were looking at to find an animal with feathers and dinosaur traits then was amazing and never heard of, after all animals fit neatly into their groups. Today a feathered dinosaur gets its five minutes of fame, nope doesn't even get a full 15 anymore, and then disappears where only paleontologists seem to remember it. It is amazing to see how far we have come! So in honor of that I figured I would share some links to other sites celebrating the day, links to my posts on closely related subjects (if I find more I will post them and if you have anymore feel free to share them in the comments), and some of the pictures I took of one specimen of Archaeopteryx, the Thermopolis Specimen, I was lucky enough to see. Enjoy and do something to celebrate the amazing animal that became part of the scientific record today!

Links:

The Witmer Lab is celebrating by unveiling a webpage that will link to some of their fancy 3D pdfs so I will let you go to their announcement page.

David at History of Geology talks briefly about the first feather.

Dinosaur Tracking gets a rare guest post from the associate web editor for Smithsonian.com Brian Wolly on his recent trip to Munich and getting to see the, surprisingly nick-named, Munich Specimen

My Pages:

My visit to the Houston Museum of Natural Science in which I got to see the Thermopolis Specimen.

My book review on the book Solnhofen: A Study in Mesozoic Palaeontology by K.W. Barthel, N.H.M. Swinburne, and S. Conway Morris which is the locality from where all the Archaeopteryx specimens have been found.

Pictures (below the fold to speed up page loading and all images are by the author)

2011 Arctic Sea Ice Minimum

So it appears we have reached the sea ice minimum for 2011 and it is depressingly low, close to the record low of 2007. Greenman3610 has a video wrapping up the sea ice minimum for the year.



Below the fold is a video by NASA explaining the importance of Arctic sea ice, I figured 2 videos in one post on my main page would probably slow down the page loading too much

Burden of Proof

So I wanted to publish this last week when the video first came out but I had some technical problems with blogger and therefore didn't sorry. In this video David Mitchell pretty much says what I have been saying for a long time, even if the earth isn't warming and/or humans aren't the ones doing it then why shouldn't we just make a better world to make a better world?

Next Golden Crocoduck Nominee

Potholer54 introduces us to his next Golden Crocoduck nominee in his newest video

I Want One!

Having more and more energy efficient houses and buildings is beneficial not just to the people who make the technology but in the long run to the people who live in the houses as Greenman3610 shows in his latest video. We have been seeing over the last few years more and more houses like these popping up around the country and as far as houses are concerned it is definitely the wave of the future. As the title of my post suggests I would really like one but that isn't going to happen for sometime. Right now though I would just take a more energy efficient apartment building but right now most apartments don't have any reason to make their buildings more energy efficient, why should they in order to maximize profit for them they need must put in the cheapest stuff available and fix broken parts with cheap parts. I want to make something clear that I don't have a problem with them trying to make a profit but I feel you could charge more rent if people didn't have to pay as much for their utilities they would want to move into your place, ok that is the end of that rant but hey its my blog. Enjoy the video.

Read the Paper!!

Potholer54 shows why it is important not to just take anyone's word on what a paper says, that includes his and mine, but to actually read it.

Ideas?

So I know the blogging here has been sporadic at best recently and for that I am sorry I just have been really busy with life. Recently I noticed that one post from January has seen a surprising number of hits so I didn't know if there was something in that post you all liked and wanted to see more of, or is it just because I linked to it recently (although the surge started before that). So consider this a free for all I want to hear what you all want to see more of and I will try to work on some new posts for you all then feel free to talk away in the comments section.

Why We Must Vaccinate

Another great video by C0nc0rdance showing the importance of vaccination. I have covered this before, for some reason my prior post has been getting tons of hits recently, and just in the last few days a new report was released which showed, shockingly, that vaccines do not cause Autism (NPR article on the report). The report did show that vaccines have side effects, this is not surprising as almost all medicines do, but that the side effects were typically minor especially when compared to the harm the actual disease would have done.

Population

So this is something that you hear a lot coming from creationists, mostly because they are just regurgitating Kent Hovind, that the population now can only have been reached with an initial population of 2. This new video by shanedk should at least partially answer that question.

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