Adventures in Paleontology
Adventures in Paleontology
Adventures in Paleontology
Miller
Arlington, Virginia
Claire Reinburg, Director Judy Cusick, Senior Editor Andrew Cocke, Associate Editor Betty Smith, Associate Editor Robin Allan, Book Acquisitions Coordinator PRINTING AND PRODUCTION Catherine Lorrain, Director Nguyet Tran, Assistant Production Manager Jack Parker, Electronic Prepress Technician Will Thomas, Jr., Art Director NATIONAL SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION Gerald F. Wheeler, Executive Director David Beacom, Publisher Copyright 2006 by the National Science Teachers Association, 1840 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22201. www.nsta.org All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. 09 08 07 06 4 3 2 1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Hansen, Thor A. Adventures in paleontology : 36 classroom fossil activities / by Thor Hansen and Irwin Slesnick ; illustrations by D.W. Miller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-87355-272-1 1. Paleontology--Study and teaching (Middle school)--Activity programs. I. Slesnick, Irwin L. II. Title. QE715.H36 2006 560.712--dc22 2006003510 NSTA is committed to publishing material that promotes the best in inquiry-based science education. However, conditions of actual use may vary, and the safety procedures and practices described in this book are intended to serve only as a guide. Additional precautionary measures may be required. NSTA and the authors do not warrant or represent that the procedures and practices in this book meet any safety code or standard of federal, state, or local regulations. NSTA and the authors disclaim any liability for personal injury or damage to property arising out of or relating to the use of this book, including any of the recommendations, instructions, or materials contained therein. Permission is granted in advance for photocopying brief excerpts for one-time use in a classroom or workshop. Permissions requests for electronic reproduction, coursepacks, textbooks, and other commercial uses should be directed to Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Dr., Danvers, MA 01923; fax 978-646-8600; www.copyright.com.
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Figures 2.12, 2.16, 2.17, 2.28, 2.41, and 7.3 adapted from Dinosaurs, by D. Norman, J. Sibbick, D. Blagden, and D. Nicholls. Random House, 1996. Figure 6.9 adapted from a photo in Dinosaurs, An Illustrated History, by E. H. Colbert, Hammond World, 1983.
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Introduction ..................
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40 Activity 9, What was the purpose of the plates on the back of Stegosaurus? ................................................42
Activity 8, Predation .....
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t one point or another, it seems like all students are interested in paleontology. Wonderful extinct animals like dinosaurs excite the imagination like almost nothing else. Once you have the students interest, you will find that a study of paleontology provides avenues of exploration into a wide variety of foundational sciences such as biology, geology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy (See Table 1). Paleontology is also an excellent way to teach to the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996), and all of the activities in this book are aligned with one or more of the Science Content Standards for grades 58 (See Table 2). We use an active hands-on approach because that is the best way to learn. A great teacher I know has a sign above his desk that reads, If they hear it, they will forget. If they see it, they will remember. If they do it, they will learn. It is the philosophy of this book that learning through hands-on activities is the best way to integrate new knowledge. The activities in this book are targeted primarily at teachers and students in grades 58 because studies have shown that these grades are a crossroads for students in regard to science. At this age many children decide whether or not they like science based on school activities, and unfortunately most decide that they do not. For example, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (1999) showed that whereas only one country outperforms U.S. students in math and science at fourth-grade level, nine countries do so by eighth grade. We believe that engaging, inquiry-based, hands-on activities represent a vital way to capture the minds of these students. Though middle school grades are the primary audience for these activities, many of them have been used with both younger and older audiences. For example, I (Thor Hansen) regularly incorporate many of the activities in this book in my college classrooms with only minor modifications. This book comprises 36 different activities organized into 9 chapters. Chapter 1 (How Do Fossils Form?) discusses the ways that organisms become fossils and illustrates these concepts with activities that simulate fossil-making processes. Chapter 2 (What Can You Learn From Fossils?) explores what fossils can teach us about ancient organisms and also includes an explanation and activities using scientific inquiry. Chapter 3 (Mass Extinctions and Meteor Collisions With Earth) discusses the recent links that have been made between meteor and asteroid impacts on Earth and the demise of animals like the dinosaurs. Activities in this chapter include how to find real meteorites in your own yard and modeling the effects of meteorite impacts. Chapter 4 (How Are Fossils Collected?) describes some ways that fossils are found and prepared and guides the reader through the steps of preparing real fossil specimens. In Chapter 5 (How Can You Tell the Age of Earth?), students will make their own model for demonstrating the great age of Earth and the relative durations of important time intervals. Chapter 6 (How Did Dinosaurs Evolve?) explores the methods of cladistics and facilitates an understanding of evolution through active learning. Chapter 7 (Diversity, Classification, and Taxonomy) places fossils in the contexts of their distribution on the globe and how we name them and quantify their communities. Chapters 8 (Fossils in Society) and 9 (Fossils in Art) look at fossils from a humanistic perspective.
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Major scientific disciplines covered in each activity in this book. Number under Activity corresponds to chapter and activity number, e.g. 1-1 refers to Chapter 1, Activity 1. Abbreviations: Biol = Biology, Chem = Chemistry, Math = Mathematics, Phys = Physics, Geol = Geology, Astro = Astronomy, Ecol = Ecology, Evol = Evolution, Sci Meth = Scientific Method, Lng/Art = Language and Art.
Activity 1-1 1-2 1-3 1-4 1-5 1-6 1-7 2-1 2-2 2-3 2-4 2-5 2-6 2-7 2-8 2-9 3-1 3-2 3-3 3-4 4-1 4-2 4-3 5-1 6-1 6-2 6-3 6-4 7-1 7-2 7-3 7-4 8-1 8-2 9-1 9-2 Biol X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X Chem Math Phys Geol X Astro Ecol Evol Sci Meth Lng/Art
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Alignment of activities in this book to the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996). Columns refer to Content Standards AG for grades 58. Number under Activity corresponds to chapter and activity number, e.g. 1-1 refers to Chapter 1, Activity 1. Abbreviations: Pers = Personal, Perspect = Perspectives.
A Science as Inquiry B Physical Science C Life Science D Earth & Space Science X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X E F G Science & Science in Pers History & Technology and Social Nature of Perspect Science
Activity 1-1 1-2 1-3 1-4 1-5 1-6 1-7 2-1 2-2 2-3 2-4 2-5 2-6 2-7 2-8 2-9 3-1 3-2 3-3 3-4 4-1 4-2 4-3 5-1 6-1 6-2 6-3 6-4 7-1 7-2 7-3 7-4 8-1 8-2 9-1 9-2
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TEACHERS NOTES:
Making a mold and cast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C H A P T E R 1 , A C T I V I T Y 1
This is a real crowd pleaser. It takes about 4560 minutes and is a little messy, but produces beautiful impressions that students will want to keep. Hand out cups and leaves (or other material to be used as fossils such as feathers or shells) and have the students put their name on the bottom of the cup. Mix a large batch of plaster of paris with water to a fairly thick consistency for the first filling of each cup. You or the students should half-fill each cup. While they are arranging their fossils on the surface, make another batch of plaster with which to cover the fossil and fill the cup. This pause will allow the initial filling to firm up a little. Fill the cups to the top and let them harden before you try to crack them open (they will feel very warm). When the plaster is hard, peel off the paper and break open the plaster at the line of the fossils. Some of the blocks will be breakable by hand. Others will need a sharp rap on a table edge or they can be opened with a chisel or nail and a hammer.
Simulating permineralization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C H A P T E R 1 , A C T I V I T Y 3
This activity produces a remarkably hard, rock-like bone out of an ordinary kitchen sponge. The sand it is buried in is also lightly cemented so that digging in it is like digging up a real fossil.
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Procedure:
Put your name on the bottom of the paper cup. Half fill the cup with plaster of paris. Press the leaf, feather, or other object you want fossilized onto surface of plaster. Do not submerge the leaves in the plaster, but make a layer sitting on the surface. The more of the surface that you cover with material the better. Wall-to-wall leaves (or feathers, or whatever) make it easier to split the plaster block later. Also if some of them touch the sides of the cup it makes it easier to see where the splitting point should be. Add plaster to near the top of the cup. Be careful as you pour the second layer of plaster. If the first layer is still very fluid, pouring the second layer may cause the two layers to mix and to jumble the leaves. You want the leaves to be on a flat surface, parallel to the table (perpendicular to the walls of the cup). For this reason, it is best to pour the first layer, lay on the leaves, and then wait a few minutes for the first layer to set a little before pouring the second layer. If you make the plaster fairly thick, it will set more quickly. After the plaster hardens (1020 minutes, it will undergo a chemical reaction that produces heat), tear off the paper cup and use the hammer and nail (like a chisel) to split the plaster block at the layer made by the leaves to reveal the mold.
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paper cup tape (masking or duct tape, scotch tape is not as good) non-toxic modeling clay or plasticene sharp knife (Exacto knife or scalpel is good. Be careful!) plaster of paris plastic container for mixing plaster.
FIGURE 1.1
Steps in making a cast of your teeth. Left: Cut paper cup, leaving a small section intact for a hinge. Middle: Fill with clay to the top of the cut and impress teeth. Right: Tape cup together tightly and add plaster.
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Simulating permineralization
M AT E R I A L S :
two bowls sand ordinary kitchen sponge salt warm water scissors spoon After an organism is buried and its flesh has rotted away, only the skeleton or shell is left. Some of these hard parts, such as wood or bone, are porous, meaning they are filled with tiny holes. When water in the ground flows through these pores, the water leaves minerals that fill up the pores and turn the fossil into rock. This process is called permineralization and is the way petrified wood and much bone is preserved. One of the most common minerals to fill wood and bone in this way is silica. Cut and polished silicaized (agatized) wood and bone is very colorful and beautiful.
Procedure:
Cut a piece of the sponge into a bone shape and bury it in sand in the bowl. Mix 2 parts salt to 5 parts warm water (e.g. 100 ml of salt to 250 ml of water) and pour the salt water into bowl (enough to completely soak the sand). Set bowl in a warm/sunny spot, under a hot lamp or in a low temperature oven (at around 250 degrees Fahrenheit, be sure to use a Pyrex bowl if you apply heat) and allow water to evaporate. In the oven, the block will dry in a few hours. If left out in the sun, it may take several days. Once dry, use the spoon to excavate your fossil. The sponge is hard because it soaked up the salty water and as the water dried, it left salt crystals in the pore spaces of the sponge. This is like permineralization: the manner in which most wood and bone is fossilized.
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lustrous steel wool (no coating) steel wire copper sulfate crystals
Procedure:
Form the wire into the shape of a person about three inches high. Fill out the body with puffs of steel wool. Make a 2% solution of copper sulfate. Fill a container with copper sulfate solution so that you can immerse the little fellow up to its waist. In a few seconds the steel (iron) will F I G U R E 1 . 2 begin being replaced by the copper in the solution and Wire figure used to simulate replacement. the iron will take the place of copper in the solution. In the end the copper fossil person is structurally identical to the original steel person.
Iron
Copper
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Fossils in strata
M AT E R I A L S :
sand plaster of paris container fossil material, such as sand, dirt, gravel, shells, etc. Fossils occur in sedimentary rock, which is rock that is composed of grains (such as sand or clay) that were laid down by water or wind. The mud or sand in a stream, lake, or desert may someday become deeply buried and turn into sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock has layers or strata that reflect the natural rhythm of weather and deposition. For example, a stream flowing normally is usually clear because slowly moving water cannot move rocks or carry much sediment. But when the stream is flooding the water is higher and faster, and is brown because it is carrying more sand and clay. It is probably also carrying sticks and leaves and perhaps a dead animal. If the stream rises so much that it overflows its banks, it will deposit its load of sand, clay, sticks, and leaves in a layer on top of the stream banks. This layer of sand and debris is a sedimentary record of a flood event. Over time many such storms will leave a thick sequence of strata that records the history of the stream and its floods. Different sedimentary environments have different types of deposits. For example, a beach deposit will typically consist of sand and seashells. A stream deposit may have sand, gravel, sticks, and leaves. A forest floor will have soil and plant debris. When sediments are deposited, new layers are always laid on top of older ones. So in a stack of such layers, the youngest layer lies on top and the layers get progressively older as you go down. You can make simulated sedimentary rock with fossils and have your own dig where you unearth and reconstruct past environments.
Procedure:
Go to several different sedimentary environments and observe the conditions you find there and collect some sediment. You might go to a beach and collect some sand and shells and perhaps a small piece of driftwood or a bird feather. You might also collect material at a pond, a meadow, a lake, or a forest. Collect some sediment or soil from each and try to find some distinctive items that will identify the environment such as leaves, fish bones, seashells, and so on. Figure out what geologic story you want to tell. For example one story might record what happens when sea level rises over a forest. This would involve a forest deposit overlain by a beach, overlain by deeper water sediments. As sea level falls, you might then expect to see another beach overlain by stream or forest deposits again. To make a sedimentary record of this sequence of events, first take a watertight container like a large plastic milk bottle or cardboard milk carton. Cut off the top and then put in layers of sediment that represent the different environments you want to portray. To portray the sea level rise and fall mentioned above, start by placing a layer of the oldest environment (forest soil) at the bottom of the carton. Place over this a layer of beach deposits and some broken shell (as you might find on
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a beach), followed by some finer sediment and more shells to represent the deeper water of the sea. The sea level fall would be the reverse of this, i.e., laying another beach layer over the deep water sediment and that in turn would be overlain by more forest or maybe a stream deposit. Try to place as many fossils and other interesting artifacts (feathers, fish or chicken bones, bottle caps, coins) in the mix as you can. You could even add a layer of modeling clay that had tracks in it. Once you have placed all the layers in the container, you can turn this sedimentary sequence into rock by making a dilute mixture of plaster of paris and water (about 3 tablespoons of plaster to 1/2 cup of water) and adding it to the sediment in the container. Slowly pour the liquid into the container until the whole thing is saturated. Let the block dry completely; at least one to two days, depending on the size of the container. Once dry you can cut or peel away the container and see the layers from the side exactly the way they would look if you were at a real rock outcrop. The dried mixture should be firm enough to be rock-like but soft enough to easily dig with a spoon or butter knife. In the classroom students should each have a brush and a digging tool. As they work from the top of the block down, they should describe the sediment, retrieve the fossils and identify and label them and place them in small containers just like a real paleontologist. An entry in their notes might look like this: Layer 1Sand and gravel with leaves and a small bone. Probably a stream deposit. Layer 2Fine sand with whole and broken seashells. Possibly a beach deposit, etc. Once they have excavated the entire block, they can reconstruct the sequence of events that took place. Remember the actual sequence is the REVERSE of the order in which they were excavated. In other words, the last or most recent event that happened is represented by the top or first layer that was excavated and the first or oldest event is at the bottom of the block.
FIGURE 1.3
Making simulated fossils in strata. Left: Fill cardboard or plastic carton with layers of sediment and fossil objects. Middle: Add dilute plaster mixture until thoroughly soaked. Right: After it dries, peel away sides of container and excavate.
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Procedure:
Obtain about a dozen fresh grapes and/or a banana. Imagine that these eshy fruits represent even larger eshy dead organisms. Place one grape and/or one slice of banana in an open dish. Observe what happens to these dead organisms over a period of several months. Place a cubic foot of forest oor litter and soil on a large sheet of butcher paper. Beginning at the top of the cube, carefully remove each layer of material. The top layer should be the most recent accumulation of leaves, twigs, lichens from the over-hanging trees. As you go deeper into the cube you should encounter increasingly older plant material. Using pictures describe the fate of plant materials that fall onto the forest oor. Select other grapes or pieces of bananas. How many different ways can you preserve the fruit so that your descendants one million years from this day will have at hand evidence of the existence of your grape or banana slice? In a sense you will manufacture a fossil.
Analysis:
What was the fate of exposed grapes and banana slices? What appears to be the fate of dead materials that accumulate on a forest oor? List the ways you, and others, were able to produce fruit fossils from fresh grapes and banana slices. Fossils you made from fresh fruit are articial in the sense that the preservation was manmade and not the way fossils form in nature. Under what circumstances do you think fossil grapes and bananas might form in nature?
Going Further:
For various reasons, most human cultures do not allow dead bodies to lie around and decompose. A large human industry manages the disposal of dead people, pets, or other organisms. Which methods of disposal of bodies recycle them? Which methods tend to preserve bodies and thus create artificial fossils?
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Fossils in amber
Interest in amber has soared since the book and movie, Jurassic Park, captured the imagination of the public. In the story scientists found Jurassic Period mosquitoes in amber that had sucked the blood of dinosaurs. By collecting the blood of the dinosaurs and amplifying the DNA in the white blood cells, the scientists were able to produce the animals from which the blood was taken. As a result, the scientists populated an entire island with extinct animals. Real life later copied fiction when scientists extracted DNA from insects in amber from ancient ages. Dr. Ral Cano of California Polytechnic State University and colleagues reported having extracted and sequenced DNA from a weevil embedded in amber from the age of dinosaurs (1993). Dr. Cano also caused excitement when he reported having cultured live symbiotic bacteria from the abdomens of stingless bees preserved in 40 million year old amber from the Dominican Republic (1994). In this activity you will polish a piece of rough amber to a clarity that will enable you to see fossil inclusions. Only rarely will you find a flower or an insect in amber. However, it is rare to find a piece of amber that does not contain some trace of past life.
M AT E R I A L S :
specimen of rough amber 80-, 280-, and 600-grit sandpaper cerium oxide polish denim cloth for polishing dissecting and compound microscopes magnifying glass.
Procedure:
Begin using 80-grit sandpaper if the rough amber is jagged and coarse. Wear the amber ore down to expose the yellow-orange amber on all sides. Use 280-grit sandpaper to expose at least two surfaces of your amber. Round off the sharp edges of your piece. Use 600-grit sandpaper to polish the specimen to a shine. Dampen the swatch of denim cloth with water, and lightly sprinkle the amber with cerium oxide, or other jewelers polish. You can use toothpaste in place of cerium oxide. Polish the sanded piece of amber until the clear faces of the specimen are free of scratches. Examine the polished piece of amber with a dissecting microscope, or thin slices with a compound microscope. Use 10x or 20x hand lenses for spot checks. When you find an interesting inclusion, record sketches of it, from several angles, on drawing paper. The organisms of the Cenozoic Era (about 65 million years ago to the present) are not so different from the insect and plants of today that you cant identify them to family and often to genus. If you have a piece of rough copala specimen much younger in age than amberyou should proceed to polish it in the same manner as the amber. The finished product can be used for science study, or for a pretty gift for a loved one.
What is amber?
Amber is fossil resin secreted by tropical flowering and conifer trees in response to wounds inflicted by boring insects, mechanical injuries, or just growth. Resins apparently provide a mechanism for sealing bark wounds and inhibiting an attack by insects and herbivores.
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FIGURE 1.4
Insect being trapped in tree sap that will eventually become amber. Drawn by Hazen Audel.
Resin also inhibits the growth of bacteria and fungi. Unlike gums, resins are not water soluble. Under conditions of moderate temperature, pressure, absence of air, and probably submergence in seawater, resins can remain intact in sediment for hundreds of millions years. Chemically, amber is a mixture of terpenoids that make up the resin and which forms after approximately 4 to 5 million years of polymerization and oxidation. Before becoming amber, the resin is in a form called copal. Resins become copal as soon as the resins lose their pliability. Fresh resin and copal from tropical rain forest are used today as a source of varnish. In the nineteenth century tons of Baltic amber were melted down for varnish. Resins should not be confused with sap, which is the water solution transported through the xylem and phloem (as maple syrup), or with gums, which are polysaccharides produced in plants as a result of bacterial infections. Ten percent of plant families produce resins, and most are tropical flowering plants. All conifers produce resins, but only pines and araucarians produce large quantities. The amber of the Dominican Republic and Mexico were produced by trees of the legume family of the genus Hymenaea. One of the major suppliers of modern resins in the tropics is a related species of Hymenaea. Amber of the temperate Baltic coast originated about 50 million years ago from the resins from the conifera family Araucariaceae. Evidence suggests that pine, once thought to be the major source of fossil resin, does not fossilize into amber. Since the infrared absorption spectrum of the conifer of Araucariaceae genus Agathis is dramatically similar to the spectrum of Baltic amber, many paleontologists think that Agathis, and not Pinus, represents the ancestral source of Baltic amber. Today, Hymenaea is distributed in South and Central America and Africa,
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and Agathis is distributed in parts of Asia, Europe, North America, and the West Indies. The dawn redwood Metasequoia glyptostroboides is a descendant of the ancient trees that produced amber in the Pacific Northwest about 50 million years ago. The process of amberization apparently requires that the polymerization of monomers (isoprenes) in fresh amber proceeds in decay-resistant environments, protected from the elements, inundated for a time by sea water, and never exposed the temperatures over 80 degrees Celsius or high tectonic pressures.
Inclusions in Amber
Fresh amber on the trunk of a tree works like fly paper. As the organism sinks in, and as the resin continues to flow, the things that stick onto the resin become embedded before the glob of resin falls off the tree, or the tree rots away leaving just the resin (Figure 1.4). Inclusions reveal the diversity of forest life. In the 25- to 40-million-years-old amber found in the Dominican Republic, the resin entombed insects, spiders, frogs, feathers, leopard fur, flowers, bacteria, molds, mosses, rotifers, snails, leaves, buds, and a zillion unidentified pieces of debris including bubbles, now filled with gas and/or liquid. While the organisms died in the soft resin, standing waves from the frantic movement of an appendage can sometimes be seen in the amber. After death, internal parasites such as worms, or external parasites such as mites, can be seen leaving the host. Mold, often with fruiting bodies and spores, can be seen on the organic debris. But the resins are powerful antibiotics and decomposition of organic material is minimal. Some animals like long-legged spiders may leave a leg or two in the resin. A bird or a mammal brushing against the resin may leave a feather or a tuft of hair behind. As mammals trapped in the La Brea tars of California, or the dinosaurs in the mud of Tendaguru in East Africa, so too were the entrapped organisms in resins eaten away by predators and scavengers. Most Dominican Republic amber is clear and golden in color, allowing biological inclusions to be seen. In contrast, Baltic amber is often cloudy due to the large numbers of air bubbles in the resin. Popular colors of cloudy amber range from a milky golden to a chalky white depending on the size and the number of bubbles. Since amber melts readily (200360 degrees Celsius), it absorbs color and oils, and accepts new inclusions easily. Altered amber can be made to appear more attractive than natural amber.
Cano, R. J. 1994. Ancient bacillus DNA: A window to ancient symbiotic relationships? ASM News. 60(3): 129134. Cano, R. J., H. N. Poinar, N. S. Pieniazek, and G. O. Poinar Jr. 1993. Enzymatic amplification and nucleotide sequencing of DNA from 120135 million year old weevil. Nature 363: 536538.
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because they have always been observed to be true (e.g., the Law of Gravity, the Law of Thermodynamics). You can practice scientific inquiry with your class with a variety of props. For example bring in a table lamp and place it on a desk. You should disable the lamp by putting in a bad bulb or loosening the bulb and leaving it unplugged. Turn the lamp switch and asked the students to make observations, e.g., the lamp does not work. Now have them propose hypotheses for why the lamp does not work. For example: Hypothesis 1: The lamp is not plugged in. Hypothesis 2: The bulb is bad. Hypothesis 3: The bulb is not screwed in. Hypothesis 4: The electricity is not working.
Now test each hypothesis by plugging the lamp in, screwing in the bulb, testing the bulb in another lamp, etc., until the correct hypothesis is found. The main points to be made here are that: 1. Scientic inquiry is not mysterious or intimidating, we all use it everyday. 2. Scientic inquiry deals only with observable natural phenomena and does not invoke supernatural causes. 3. Scientic inquiry is a series of processes and its conclusions are tentative. We must be willing to alter our hypotheses to accommodate new evidence.
TEACHERS NOTES:
The purpose of this set of activities is to enable student to engage in the same kind of investigative study as do paleontologists. Activities 13 progress from reconstructing an entire living human using evidence gathered from an examination of only that persons hand, to the reconstruction and restoration of an authentic 150 million-year-old pterosaur fossil.
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An assembled skeleton of Goldfusss Scaphognathus crassirostris appears in Figure 2.6 as students might assemble the bones. Few students can fully assemble the bones without help. The real or drawn skeletons of bats and birds and other vertebrates will help students figure out the sequence of appendage bone and vertebrae. Getting the giant finger in position often requires an intuitive leap. Restoring the living fossil and placing it in a suitable environment challenges the serious student to be scientifically accurate and imaginative at the same time. Figure 2.7 includes a sample of professional restoration of Scaphognathus crassirostris.
FIGURE 2.6
Reconstructed skeleton of Scaphognathus crassirostris.
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FIGURE 2.7
Life restoration of Scaphognathus crassirostris.
Question: What was the purpose of the plates on the back of Stegosaurus? .................... C H A P T E R 2 , A C T I V I T Y 9
This is a guided discussion activity that practices using scientific inquiry on a question about Stegosaurus. You might start by asking the question and then letting the students come up with as many different hypotheses as they can about the purpose of the plates. Then help them clarify what they mean about each hypothesis. For example if a student says the plates were for defense, you should ask them to give an example of a living animal that does this which will then allow you to make predictions to test these hypotheses. This activity is an example of how this discussion might proceed.
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M AT E R I A L S :
mystery person dark cloth to cover a doorway with small slit for hand chair desk ruler magnifying glass clock with second hand
Objectives:
1. Observe, measure, and record characteristics of one hand of a person sitting outside your view. 2. Infer the characteristics of the whole mystery person and draw a composite picture.
Procedures:
1. Make a list of characteristics you can infer by examining the hands of people (Figure 2.1). Next to each characteristic describe the clues you will look for in the hand to give good ideas about the whole person. Perhaps you will do this planning the day before the hand of the mystery person enters your classroom through a hole in the sheet that covers the doorway. 2. After the hand appears at the doorway, examine the hand with your group. On the table with the hand should be some instruments for examining features of the hand: a magnifying glass to see the color of hair, a ruler to compare the finger lengths of the mystery hand and your own, and a clock with a second hand to compare the pulse of the hand with your own. Record your data. After returning to your seat, study your data. Then write a description of the mystery person, including its physical appearance, its behaviors and anything else you can infer. 3. After the class has discussed everyones observations and inferences, a class composite of the mystery person can be assembled. Since the mystery person represents a whole living fossil, something paleontologists never get to see, perhaps the activity would be more true to science if the class would never see the mystery person. The class will have to decide whether the mystery person (fossil) should ever show itself.
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FIGURE 2.1
Students attempting to discern characteristics of a mystery person by his hand.
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Going Further:
What can you infer about a nation by studying just the coins or stamps the government issued? What can archeologists tell about an ancient civilization by examining buried trash piles? What can police scientists infer from hair, blood, or auto tracks found at a crime scene? Examine the picture of the skeleton below. What can you infer about the biology of this animal from what you observe here?
FIGURE 2.2
Skeleton of a bat.
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FIGURE 2.4
Reconstruction of lagoon environment in which Scaphognathus crassirostris was deposited.
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Objectives:
1. Reconstruct the skeleton of a mystery fossil from the Jurassic Period. 2. Make inferences about what the fossil animal looked like when alive, what food it ate, and its mode of transportation.
Procedure:
1. Cut out the life-size pictures of the mystery fossils bones as originally drawn by Goldfuss (Figure 2.5). 2. Use your knowledge about vertebrate skeletons and if available, the pictures of skeletons of such familiar animals as mammals, birds, and lizards. Begin your assembly at the head with the skull and jaw. Lay out the bones of the neck, chest, hip, and tail. Add the smaller leg bones to the hip. The thigh bone ts into the hip bone. A single leg bone connects with the thigh (you have two leg bones in each of your own legs). The small 4-toe feet connect with the leg bones. The larger upper arm bones connect with the shoulder blades. The lower arm bones are composed of two fused bones, to which the hand connects at the wrist. The fth nger of each hand of the fossil is almost as large as its entire body. When your skeleton is assembled to your satisfaction, fix it in position by taping the bones together. You may wish to mount the model skeleton on a piece of poster paper.
Analysis:
1. How tall was the animal? __________ How wide was the animal when spread out? __ ________ Most animals barely oat in water. Knowing the approximate volume of the animal and the density of water, what do you estimate the weight of the animal to be? __________ 2. What do you think was the function of the huge nger on each hand? 3. What modern animals do you think this fossil was most like? In what ways does it appear to have differed from modern animals that may live like it did? 4. What do the teeth in the skull and jaw tell you about feeding habits? How do you explain the large open spaces in the skull, the hollow long bones? The small feet with tiny claws and the large hands with large claws?
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FIGURE 2.5
Life-size picture of the fossil as originally drawn by Goldfuss.
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M AT E R I A L S :
crayons water paints poster paper clay
Procedure:
1. Look at the fossil skeleton for several minutes. Think about who this animal was, living around 150 million years ago in a tropical land by the sea now known as Germany. Measure the length of the head and the length of the body. Imagine how it might have moved about: For what purposes did it use the claws on its ngers? Was its skin bare, or was there a protective and/or insulating covering? 2. Now in the imaginative part of your mind pretend you and this beautiful beast are buddies. Spend a Jurassic day together: Travel together, eat together, double date. Become part of its life. Call it by its scientic name, Scaphognathus crassirostris. 3. Draw and color a scientically accurate portrait of Scaphognathus crassirostris in a typical pose. Include in the background of the portrait evidence of its modes of locomotion, feeding behavior, and its habitat. You may wish to create a sculpture of the animal and include elements of its environment. See Figure 2.6 for an example of a reconstruction. 4. On the reverse of the picture, or on separate paper, make a list of questions about Scaphognathus crassirostrisquestions you truly wish to answer.
Going Further:
According to the latest counts, 20 families, 40 genera, and 100 species of pterosaurs have been discovered and described from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods. Scaphognathus was one of the 40 genera that included two species, Scaphognathus crassirostris and Scaphognathus purdoni. Pterosaurs ranged in size from the sparrow-like Anurognathus to the small airplane-sized Quetzalcoatlus. Pterosaurs lived for about 120 million years and were the dominant airborne vertebrates of the Mesozoic Era. Pterosaurs lived and died out with the dinosaurs. What can you find out about the evolution of pterosaurs? How did they relate with birds? How could the birds have survived the mass extinction crisis of 65 million years ago, but not the pterosaurs? What factors do you think contributed to pterosaur extinction?
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Tracking dinosaurs
Tracks and traces are unique as fossils because they provide direct evidence of behavior in extinct animals. For instance, tracks can tell us if dinosaurs walked with their legs spread wide apart like a crocodile or closer together like a horse. Tracks can tell us how fast animals ran, or whether they traveled in herds. F I G U R E 2 . 8 There is even a trackway that suggests a dinosaur stampede! Trackway of a carnosaur and a hadrosaur. Lets see how much we can tell from the dinosaur trackways at left (Figure 2.8): First, we can see that there are two trackways made by two different kinds of dinosaurs. We can also tell that both dinosaurs walked on two legs (bipeds) because the tracks are evenly spaced apart. The tracks of four legged animals (quadrupeds) tend to occur in pairs. You can demonstrate this by walking on a sheet of butcher paper with wet socks.
FIGURE 2.9
Human tracks made on paper. Top: walking normally. Bottom: walking on all fours.
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FIGURE 2.10
Tracks made by a hadrosaur, allosaur, ankylosaur, and sauropod.
First walk normally and see how the footprints are evenly spaced and occur along a line. Then walk on all fours and notice how the prints are paired and also spread apart laterally. You could get really fancy and make a tail to drag along, producing a tail-drag mark. Note that sauropod dinosaur trackways almost never show a tail-drag mark. What does this tell us about how sauropods held their tails? Use the Dinosaur Track Field Guide at right (Figure 2.10) to identify the dinosaurs that made the trackways on the previous page.
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FIGURE 2.11
Outline of a Tyrannosaurus rex footprint.
It is also possible to guess the size of the dinosaur that made a track. Generally the length of a dinosaur footprint was 1/4 the length of the leg (1/5 in the case of some of the skinnier bipeds such as the coelurosaurs). Since most dinosaurs walked with their backbones parallel to the ground, this is also a rough measure of their height. The largest Tyrannosaurus rex (tyrannosaur) footprint ever found was 34 inches in length. Make an overhead transparency of the footprint (Figure 2.11) and project it at actual size (34 inches long) to get a feel for just how big this is. What was the leg length of the dinosaur that made this print? How long was the tyrannosaur that made the track in Figure 2.11? This can be determined by comparing the leg length with the length of the body in Figure 2.12 below. The leg length is what fraction of the overall length? How long was the tyrannosaur that made the track?
FIGURE 2.12
Skeleton of an adult Tyrannosaurus rex.
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FIGURE 2.13
Human footprints. Top: spacing seen in a slow walk. Bottom: spacing seen in a fast walk.
Now try another demonstration with the butcher paper. First walk normally and then speed up. Notice how the footprints get farther apart with increased speed (Figure 2.13). Now how would you interpret the trackway below? What dinosaur made the tracks and what did it do? Putting everything we have learned together, how would you interpret the trackway below (Figure 2.15)? What dinosaurs made the tracks, how big were they, what happened?
FIGURE 2.14
Hadrosaur tracks indicating a change of direction and an increase in speed.
FIGURE 2.15
Hadrosaur tracks indicating change of direction and speed. Carnosaur tracks on intercept course and speeding up.
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Duckbill dinosaurs (ornithopods) are one of the few dinosaur groups where it is not obvious how they walked, i.e., on two or four legs. Their forelegs were large enough to reach the ground comfortably, so they could have walked on all four legs (quadrupedal, Figure 2.16) or on two legs (bipedal, Figure 2.17). Figure 2.18 is the track of a kind of ornithopod called a hadrosaur. What does this track tell us about how hadrosaurs walked? How would you interpret the trackway in Figure 2.19? FIGURE 2.16 With these tools, you can make Hadrosaur walking quadrupedally. additional scenarios, or have the students make their own. You can use the templates provided in the following figures to make your own tracks and lay them out across the floor. With their Dinosaur Track Field Guides and rulers, the students can identify the dinosaurs, calculate their sizes, and reconstruct their behavior.
FIGURE 2.17
Hadrosaur walking bipedally.
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FIGURE 2.18
Trackway of a hadrosaur.
FIGURE 2.19
Trackways of three sauropods; two adults and one juvenile.
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FIGURE 2.20
Footprint of a hadrosaur.
FIGURE 2.21
Left front (left) and left rear (right) footprints of the sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus.
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Weighing dinosaurs
Tyrannosaurus may have weighed 7 tons. Brachiosaurus perhaps weighed 55 tons. Where do these figures come from? How can scientists calculate the weight of an extinct animal? One way is to just take a scale model of a dinosaur, measure the weight of the water it displaces and scale up for the dinosaur weight. Heres the reasoning. All animals are about the same density as water. We are mostly composed of water, and the weight of the heavier parts like bone is offset by the air spaces in our lungs. You can test this by getting in a pool. If you take a deep breath and lie face down in the water, you will float. Most people will tend to sink when they exhale. Therefore we (and most other F I G U R E 2 . 2 2 animals) have a density near that of water [a density of 1.0]. So it stands to reason if you take an accurate scale model of a dinosaur, Apparatus used to measure the measure the weight of the water it displaces and then scale this volume of a dinosaur model. number up, you will get a reasonable estimate of the weight of the dinosaur. The tricky part is that a scale, say 1/40 scale, is a linear scale. It only measures one dimension, while a dinosaur is a 3-dimensional object. Therefore when you scale up the weight of your model, say 5 fluid ounces, you must multiply this number by 40 x 40 x 40, or 40 cubed, to get the approximate weight of the dinosaur. Of course the accuracy of your estimate is very dependent on the accuracy of the scale model. For example, if the reconstruction of the dinosaur in the model is too skinny, then the final weight estimate can be very far off.
M AT E R I A L S :
watertight container pan to catch overflow of water dinosaur model
Procedure:
1. Place the watertight container inside of pan and ll the container with water to the very brim. 2. Now carefully place the dinosaur model into container, allowing the water to spill out into the pan. You should use a good quality scale model such as those produced by the British Museum or the Carnegie Institute if you want an accurate estimate. But any model will work. 3. Now carefully remove the container without spilling any additional water and measure the amount of water in the pan. This is the displacement of your model. You can use a standard measuring cup or one graduated in milliliters. A uid ounce of water weighs close to one ounce (remember, a pint is a pound the whole world around) and a milliliter of waters weighs one gram.
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Metric 148 milliliters 148 grams 1/40 148 x 403 = 9,472,000 gm 9,472,000 gm or 9,472 kg
Displacement of model: Weight of model: Scale of model: Weight scale cubed: Est. dinosaur weight:
5 fluid oz. 5 ounces (approx.) 1/40 5 x 403 = 320,000 oz 320,000 oz or 20,000 lbs.
Going Further:
Commercial models such as those by the Carnegie Institute, are made for normal adult dinosaurs at a 1/40 scale. So measuring the displacement of the Brachiosaurus model and scaling up by 40 cubed will give you the weight of a normal adult Brachiosaurus. It can be fun to estimate the weight of the largest dinosaurs such as Ultrasauros, Supersaurus, or Seismosaurus (or for other animals, such as whales) by changing the scale and using the appropriate model. An Ultrasauros is simply a huge dinosaur very much like a Brachiosaurus (Seismosaurus and Supersaurus were shaped much like Diplodocus or Apatosaurus). To estimate the weight of Supersaurus, take a Diplodocus model and divide its length (lm, about 1.5 feet) into the length of Supersaurus (ld, around 140 feet). ld/lm = 140 feet/1.5 feet = 93.3333 or a scale of about 1/93 Then follow the same procedure that you would for any other model.
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FIGURE 2.23
Human (left) and crocodile (right) leg.
FIGURE 2.24
Postures of a sprawling, semi-erect, and erect animals.
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FIGURE 2.25
Hind limbs of an armadillo (left), coyote (middle), and antelope (right).
Figure 2.25 shows the hind legs of three different mammals (an armadillo, coyote, and antelope) arranged according to speed and drawn so that the femur lengths are the same. The armadillo is the slowest and the antelope is the fastest. What observations can you make about how the legs differ as the animal gets faster? Based on your observations from the armadillo, coyote, and antelope legs, how fast do you think the animals in Figure 2.26 are? Which is fastest, slowest, and in between? Now lets see if you are correct. Figure 2.27 shows how these animals would perform in a race. Now assess the speeds of the dinosaurs in Figure 2.28.
FIGURE 2.26
Skeletons of an antelope (A), coyote (B), horse (C) and elephant (D).
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FIGURE 2.27
A hypothetical race between some common animals.
FIGURE 2.28
Skeletons of a Stegosaurus (left), Camarasaurus (middle), and Struthiomimus (right).
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Fossilization
Taphonomy is the science that tries to explain how living organisms, their parts, tracks, and traces become fossils in the rock of Earth. Taphonomy addresses all the biological and physical processes that transform an organism as it leaves the biosphere and becomes established in the lithosphere.
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FIGURE 2.29
Dinosaur nesting site from about 75 million years ago.
The fates of organisms after death depend on many variables: where they die, how they die, the altitude of the land, the turbulence of the seawater, the fallout of a volcano, how palatable they are to other organisms, how quickly they become buried in sediments, and how mineralized is their skeletal structure. The list of conditions that favor fossilization is extensive. To get a handle on the processes by which a dying organism leaves evidence of its existence, we will illustrate the events of life and death as it occurred at the nesting sites of a species of hadrosaur during the late Cretaceous Period. Figure 2.29 depicts the fates of dinosaur eggs in nest sites of about 75 million years ago. Similar nest sites have been found in northern China, in the basins the Rocky Mountains
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of Montana and Alberta, and in southern France. Included in the figure are the fates of dinosaurs whose remains were found at the nest site. In the figure, the eggs in the nest on the hill are alive and just beginning to hatch. Notice that several babies are running around and several eggs are cracking. Bushes and boughs provide protective cover and bedding and possibly food. The nest is on high ground, possibly on an island of a continental lake or sea. Adults have been tending to the eggs. As the eggs hatch, shells are trampled, scattered and powdered by the babies. The younger members of the family then join the parents in migratory herds and return to the breeding site the following season. Predators eat some of the young; others die, rapidly decompose, and disappear. The same family will use the same nest site with a new layer of sediment again and again.
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at the time of the ood. The eggs were preserved in their original shape and appearance. A form of calcium carbonate from the water inltrated the shell with a form of limestone. A few baby dinosaur bones have been recovered in the eggs. These dinosaur eggs were preserved by an almost instantaneous protection against destruction by predators, decomposition, and the elements of the water. Immediate burial in toxic water pickled the eggs during the rst few days of their 75 million years internment as fossils in rock. Once buried sediments, and now rock, the eggs become subject to various physical and chemical changes. In this instance, the eggs became a true fossil in the original form, made of an original shell surrounding a calcium carbonate center with or without the remains of a developing dinosaur. In another instance, the shell disappeared, leaving an impression or replacement of mineral in the shape of the original specimen. The original fossil is replaced with a casting of a new chemical composition, known as pseudomorph. Whichever fate the eggs follow, the ultimate fate is deformation and the redistribution of minerals by natural geological processes.
Questions
1. The rains that wash the land and drain the tributaries of loose bones will carry them many miles from their source in the breeding ground. Along the way they will be scattered, a tooth here and a bone there, in the sand of a river. When the river slows, a large amount of debrisincluding a large amount of boneswill settle into a graveyard of bones collected from a large area. Of what possible use to paleontologists would a collection of such varied bones be? 2. One dinosaur weighed about 25 tons. It accumulated this mass by eating an enormous weight of leaves of the evergreen trees. And in less than two days scavengers (dinosaurs, pterosaurs, small mammals, insects, and bacteria) returned the carcass to dust without a trace. The scavengers then die and their esh and bones are eaten and (in rare circumstance) they are preserved as fossils. What keeps the cycle going year after year, for as long as organisms have been on Earth? (The Sun and Photosynthesis) 3. The bones of every fossil do not last forever. The bone may be replaced by agate and calcite. Pretty soon you cannot tell fossil from rock, it turns into indistinguishable rock. Is this a fact? 4. Most of the fossils of dinosaur babies come from eggs that were of the Cretaceous Period. Fossils of Jurassic babies are few, and fossils of Triassic babies are rare. Why do you think that may be so? 5. After an egg loses its shell it has no protection from soil or water. Minerals from the soil or the water replace the internal content of the egg. The internal substance may look like an egg but it really is notit is a pseudomorph. A pseudomorph may look exactly like an egg but inside of it is nothing but mineral. How would you proceed to make a pseudomoph of an egg?
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Predation
Predation occurs when one organism feeds on another. Seashells, both fossil and recent, make excellent subjects to observe the effects of predation because many marine predators leave distinctive marks on the shells of their victims or prey. Knowledge of how to read these marks can make a trip to the beach seem like unraveling a crime story. Topic: Predator/Prey Moon snails are members of the family Naticidae (phylum Mollusca, class Gastropoda). Go to: www.scilinks.org They are found in marine waters all over the world, although they are more common in Code: AP006 areas that have sandy or muddy bottoms. Moon snails have a round shell that is actually too small for them to completely withdraw their bodies (Figure 2.30). Moon snails crawl along the surface or burrow within sand and mud in search of molluscan prey, usually clams FIGURE 2.30 and snails. They are very slow movers, so the prey must be equally slow in order to be run down. Once captured, Moon snail shell (left) and live moon snail (right) showing its foot and mantle. the prey is enveloped in the moon snails large foot and held while the moon snail drills a distinctive beveled hole (Figure 2.31) in the shell of the prey. It drills this hole by secreting acid onto a spot on the shell and then filing away the loosened material with its radula. Once the drill hole is complete, the moon snail inserts its
FIGURE 2.32
Shells of two species of Muricidae, which drill small, vertically sided holes in the shells of their prey.
FIGURE 2.31
Incomplete (left) and complete (right) drill holes in shells created by moon snails.
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FIGURE 2.33
Shell clipping crab attacking a snail.
proboscis into the shell and eats the flesh of the animal. The drilling process takes many hours during which the moon snail may be interrupted. If the prey escapes, it may have an incomplete drillhole. If the moon snail recaptures the prey, it will start drilling again, but in a new position. This may result in multiple drill holes. Therefore incomplete drill holes and multiple drill holes usually indicate that the moon snail had difficulty handling the prey. Snails of the family Muricidae (Figure 2.32) also drill holes in shells. These snails crawl on the surface of the sediment and look for prey that also live on the surface, like oysters and mussels. The drill holes of the murex shells can be distinguished from moon snail drills because they are not beveled and have straight sides as if the hole was excavated by a power drill. Many crabs feed on clams and snails. Some of these crabs attack the snail by carefully opening the shell along the whorl like a can opener (Figure 2.33). Victims of these attacks have a distinctive channel cut into the shell. Survivors of such attacks can be found with healed scars in the shell (Figure 2.34).
FIGURE 2.34
Shell of whelk that was damaged by a crab (left) and volute snail that survived a crab attack and regrew its shell (right).
Activity:
Go to a beach with seashells or bring a bucket of shells into class. Look through the shells for the distinctive marks of predation. How many shells are drilled? Which of these drills are from moon snails and which, if any, are from murex shells? Calculate the percentage of drilled shells. In some places drilling can be as high as 30% of the population. Look for evidence of crab predation. How many shells have evidence of crab predation? How many survived the attack and regrew their shell? Do any of the snails show evidence of multiple attacks? Have any shells been attacked by both snails and crabs?
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FIGURE 2.37
Scared cat arching its back and extending its fur to make itself look larger to enemies.
FIGURE 2.36
African porcupine showing its spiny defense.
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FIGURE 2.38
Puffer fish in its normal uninflated pose (bottom) and how it looks when threatened (top). Hypothesis 1: Defense/Armor. The plates serve as armor to thwart attack by predators. For example, turtles and armadillos are covered by plates (Figure 2.35). Hypothesis 2: Defense/Spikes. For example porcupines have sharp spines for protection (Figure 2.36). Hypothesis 3: Defense/Display. The plates make Stegosaurus look bigger to scare away predators. For example, many animals, such as cats, try to make themselves look bigger when they are scared (Figure 2.37).
Some animals may combine these traits. For example when the puffer fish is frightened, it puffs up to make itself larger and is also covered with spines (Figure 2.38). Hypothesis 4: Courtship/Display. The plates are for attracting mates. For example male peacocks have large and elaborate feathers, which seem to be solely for attracting mates (Figure 2.39). Hypothesis 5: Thermoregulation. The plates allow Stegosaurus to collect and radiate heat. For example elephants are large animals that live in a hot environment. They use their large ears to help radiate the heat their body produces (Figure 2.40).
FIGURE 2.39
Male peacock shows off its plumage to a female.
Now lets make observations and predictions about these different hypotheses. Observations in this case mean looking at the characteristics of each of the traits, e.g., are porcupine quills sharp or dull? Once you have described how those traits fit a
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FIGURE 2.40
Elephant and its ears, rich with blood vessels, which help radiate heat.
particular hypothesis, you test that hypothesis by making a prediction about Stegosaurus. For example: Porcupine spines are sharp, therefore if Stegosaurus plates were serving a protective function like porcupine spines do, you would expect Stegosaurus plates to be sharply pointed. If Stegosaurus plates are not sharply pointed (which they arent) then you reject the hypothesis that the plates served as that kind of defense. Hypothesis 1: Defensive armor. Observations: Turtles and armadillos have tough platy armor that covers their entire body. The underside of turtles is covered by plates. Armadillos have a soft belly, but this vulnerable area is protected by their habit of rolling up into a ball. Prediction: Stegosaurus plates will be tough and will cover the vital areas of the body. Hypothesis 2: Defensive spikes. Observations: Porcupine quills are sharp, stiff, barbed, and deter attackers by puncturing their skin. Prediction: Stegosaurus plates will be strong and pointed. Hypothesis 3: Defensive display. Observations: Animals have a variety of ways to make themselves look larger. They may raise their feathers or hair or puff up their bodies. The result is a much larger looking animal. When they are not scared they usually lower their defenses and return to their normal appearance. Prediction: Stegosaurus plates will make the animal look significantly larger and may be moveable. Hypothesis 4: Courtship display. Observations: In animals such as peacocks where large showy feathers attract mates, only the males have the large display feathers while the females are much drabber in appearance (this is called sexual dimorphism). Prediction: Male Stegosaurus will have large plates and females will have smaller plates or no plates at all.
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FIGURE 2.41
Skeleton of Stegosaurus.
Hypothesis 5: Thermoregulation. Observations: Elephant ears are large and thin and full of blood vessels. Blood is then pumped into these blood vessels and heat is radiated out of the animal through the thin skin of the ear. Prediction: Stegosaurus plates will be large and thin and full of blood vessel holes. Now lets make some observations on Stegosaurus and test these predictions (Figure 2.41): 1. Stegosaurus plates are not attached to the skeleton; they are embedded in the skin of the animal. 2. They occur in two rows down the back in a staggered arrangement. 3. They are largest over the hip and smallest over the neck and the middle of the tail. 4. They are thin (Figure 2.42) 5. They are more or less ve-sided, and though some have points they are not sharp enough to puncture an attackers skin (Figure 2.42). 6. They are full of blood vessels holes and very porous (Figure 2.42). 7. As far as we can tell (it is hard to tell the gender in dinosaurs from skeletons), Stegosaurus plates were not sexually dimorphic, i.e., both males and females had large plates.
FIGURE 2.42
Stegosaurus plate showing its porosity and thinness.
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It is convenient to place these predictions and tests in a table: Hypothesis Defensive Armor Defensive Spikes Defensive Display Courtship Display Thermoregulation Prediction Plates tough and cover vital areas Plates strong and sharp Plates make Stegosaurus look larger Test No: plates weak and do not cover sides No: plates weak and not sharp Yes
Males have plates, females dont No: both sexes have plates Plates thin and porous with many blood vessel holes Yes
Conclusion:
The plates fail our tests for defensive armor, spikes, and courtship display. They meet our predictions for defensive display and thermoregulation. Can we distinguish between these two hypotheses? Lets look at the arrangement of the plates. They occur in two rows down the back in a staggered or offset pattern. If the primary purpose of the plates was to make the animal look larger, then the actual arrangement would not be important, i.e., they could occur in a single row or in two rows without overlap. However the arrangement may be important if the plates serve as heat collectors or radiators. Some scientists did an experiment in which they made metal models to simulate three different plate arrangements. One model had a single long fin running down the back, the second model had two rows of plates arranged directly opposite each other, and the third model had two rows of plates arranged in a staggered or offset pattern as in Stegosaurus. The surface areas of the plates were the same for all three models. They heated the models to the same temperature, put them in a wind tunnel and then measured how fast each of them radiated heat. The third model, with the plates in two staggered rows, radiated heat the fastest. This further supports the hypothesis that the plates were used for thermoregulation. But we still cant definitively state the purpose of the Stegosaurus plates. While Stegosaurus is the only member of an entire group of armored dinosaurs with flat plates in two rows, it is difficult to imagine it had a unique metabolism from all its relatives. The exact purpose of the plates remains an unanswered mystery.
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Final Note:
All scientific hypotheses are tentative. A new analysis with more information may yield a different result. Also, many body parts may serve multiple functions. The claws of a bear can be used for digging but they also make formidable weapons. Likewise, the plates on Stegosaurus may have served several purposes, e.g., heat regulation and defensive display.
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Causes of extinctions
Over 99% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct. This statement seems outrageous on the face of it, but lets work it out. The average geological life span of a species is about 5 million years. Complex organisms large enough to be seen with the naked eye have been around for over 500 million years. Thus, there have been over a hundred generations of species on the planet, Earth on average replacing its organisms with new species every 5 million years. Therefore over 99% of all species that have lived are now extinct. Put in this simplistic way, extinction is a natural process that occurs all the time, right along with speciation or the evolution of new species.
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FIGURE 3.2
Geological time scale
But lets look at extinction in more detail. Paleontologists divide extinctions into two broad categories: background extinctions and mass extinctions. Background extinctions occur continuously as a result of environmental changes, predation, competition, etc. They probably occur at a rate of 10s to 100s of species per year. Generally species that go extinct in this fashion have been replaced by the evolution of new species so that overall diversity, or the total number of species, has remained stable or increased. Mass extinctions are unusual in that they involve very large numbers (millions) of species, of very different kinds (e.g., clams, dinosaurs, plants) dying within a relatively short time. What is a short time? To a geologist, a short time means around 12 million years. Although some extinctions probably occurred over much shorter intervals, say hundreds to thousands of years, it is difficult to tell time with this much precision in the rock record. Often all we know is that the extinction took less than a million years. Mass extinctions mark turning points in evolution. The biggest extinctions not only killed a lot of species, they also altered the biological landscape so that the organisms and communities that took the place of the extinct ones were radically different. Geologists divide Earths history into intervals called eons, eras, and periods (Figure 3.2). The Phanerozoic Eon, which stared about 545 million years ago, is divided into 3 eras and 12 periods. During the Phanerozoic Eon there were five major mass extinctions and many smaller ones. The two biggest extinctions occurred at the Paleozoic-Mesozoic and Mesozoic-Cenozoic boundaries, and most other major extinctions occured at or near period boundaries. This is no coincidence. The geologic time scale was divided and named based on the great changes in life brought about by the extinctions. The extinction at the Mesozoic-Cenozoic boundary occurred about 65 million years ago. Its most famous victims were the dinosaurs, but many other groups went extinct including swimming and flying reptiles, many groups of mollusks, and many species of marine microplankton. Over
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half of all species went extinct at this time. What caused this extinction? There is a great deal of evidence that suggests it was caused by an asteroid impact. This evidence includes a giant impact crater buried beneath the surface of the Yucatn Peninsula in Central America. In addition, a variety of particles and elements that are indicative of an impact were deposited in rocks in the same sedimentary layer as the extinctions. What were the effects of the impact of this asteroid? Given an estimate of the mass and speed of the asteroid, the effects can be modeled (see Activities 24 in this chapter). For instance, if we assume the asteroid was 10 km in diameter (based on the size of the crater beneath the Yucatn Peninsula), and was traveling about 30 km per second (about the average speed of meteorites), and had the density of an average asteroid, then the energy released by its impact would be equal to about 10 billion 15-kiloton (about the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima) atomic bombs. Or put another way, an energy release equivalent to covering every square meter of land on Earth with two tons of TNT. The effect of this much energy released in one place is fantastic. There is evidence of huge tsunamis emanating from the impact site and striking all around the Gulf of Mexico. There is evidence that the heat of the explosion ignited forest fires around the world. The smoke from these fires and the dust thrown into the atmosphere from the impact probably shut out sunlight and darkened the surface for months. The lack of light had disastrous effects on plant life, which in turn affected the herbivorous animals that ate the plants and then the carnivores that ate the herbivores. By destroying the plants at the base of the food chain, a vast chain reaction was set in motion that resulted in many of the worlds species dying out. Though the evidence is strong for an impact at the Mesozoic-Cenozoic extinction, evidence for impact as a cause is weak or lacking for most of the other extinctions. There have been many other causes proposed for these extinctions including massive volcanic eruptions, changes in sea level, and climatic cooling. Periods of widespread volcanism put huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, meaning it helps trap heat from the sun in our atmosphere, and sudden large inputs of this gas could quickly raise global temperatures. Overheating of Earth can cause extinctions by melting the polar ice caps and raising the sea level, slowing ocean circulation and upwelling, and by simply making it too warm for many species to survive. New species would evolve to live in these new oceans and in the warmer temperatures, but not before extinctions had occurred. There is some evidence that the Permian-Triassic extinction was the result of global warming and large expanses of volcanic lava erupted at about this time. Sudden cooling can also cause extinctions. It is well known that fewer species of plants and animals live in polar and temperate regions than in the tropics. So a climatic event that turns a largely tropical world into a temperate or polar one will cause many extinctions. There is a great deal of evidence that suggests that extinctions at the end of the Ordovician Period and in the Mid-Cenozoic were caused by global cooling. Sea
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level changes can cause extinction by drowning a previously dry continent, and thus killing the animals that lived on the continent, or by exposing an area that was previously underwater and thereby killing the marine life that inhabited the former ocean. At several times in Earths past, vast areas of the continents have been flooded or exposed. Half of North America was underwater at some time during the age of the dinosaurs. To make matters more complicated, both global warming and cooling will affect sea level by melting or growing the polar ice caps, so several different causes may act in concert to cause an extinction.
TEACHERS NOTES:
Answers to questions in Activity 2:
QUESTION 1:
Answer: The mass of the meteor can be calculated by multiplying its volume by its density. Lets assume the meteor is a sphere. The volume of a sphere is 4/3r3. Iron/nickel has a density of about 8 grams per cubic centimeter. Therefore the mass of the meteor = (4/3)(3.1416)(0.05cm)3 (8g/cm3)=0.0042g or 0.0000042kg. The kinetic energy can be calculated with the equation KE = mv2 = (0.05)(0.0000042kg)(32000m/sec)2 = 2150 Joules. Energy released is the equivalent of 0.51 calories, about the energy you get from four ounces of diet soda.
QUESTION 2:
Answer: Convert tons to kilograms: 1 kilogram = 2.2 pounds, therefore 50 tons = (50 tons)(2000lbs/ton)/2.2kgs/lb = 45454.5 kg KE = (0.5)(45454.5kg)(32000 m/sec)2 = 2.33 x 1013 joules. To help put this in perspective, a thousand tons of TNT (1 kiloton) has an energy yield 4.2 x 1012 Joules. Therefore 2.33 x 1013 joules is about the yield of 5,000 tons of TNT.
QUESTION 3:
Answer: Convert miles to centimeters and find the volume of the asteroid: 6 miles = (6mi)(5280ft/mi)(30.5cm/ft) = 966240cm. Volume = 4/3r3 = (4/3)(3.1416)(483120cm)3 = 4.72 x 1017 cubic cm. (Volume)(density) = mass Mass = (4.72 x 1017cc)(8g/cc) = 3.8 x 1018g or 3.8 x 1015kg. KE = (0.5)(3.8 x 1015kg)(32000m/sec)2 = 1.95 x 1024 joules. (Additional energy released after impact originates from such exothermic reactions as the burning of trees and sulfur.) Lets put 1.95 x 1024 joules in perspective: The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima has a yield of 20 kilotons of TNT. Therefore, the Hiroshima A-bomb had an energy yield of (20)(4.2 x 1012 joules) = 8.4 x 1013 joules. If we divide this figure into the kinetic energy of our six-mile asteroid, we find that its impact would release the energy equivalent of 23 billion A-bombs. That is enough to strap four A-bombs onto every man, woman and child on the planet.
QUESTION4:
Answer: KE = (0.5)(63000tons)(2000lbs/ton)/2.2lbs/kg) (10mi/sec)(5280ft/mi)(0.305m/ft)2 = 7.4x1015 joules This is the energy equivalent of 90 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
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M AT E R I A L S :
spoon cup zip-lock bag
Procedures:
1. Collect several spoons full of dirt from the base of a drain spout or a rain gutter of a house magnet or other building. Tile roofs are best since they do not produce other particles, and they magnifying lens drain well. Pour the dirt into a cup. Dry the dirt. Place a strong magnet in a plastic bag. Run microscope and slides the bagged magnet through the collected dirt allowing magnetic dirt to cling to the plastic petroleum jelly bag. Release the magnetic dirt into a white dish. Use a microscope to search for spherical HCl or smooth objects that may have amed and melted when they entered the atmosphere, forming droplets as they cooled. An alternative technique is to use a piece of transparent tape nitric acid to pick up the magnetic particles from the white dish, and view the strip with a microscope. NH4OH 2. Catch micrometeorites on a greased slide. Thinly coat a microscope slide with petroleum citric acid jelly. Heat the slide to obtain a thin uniform lm. Expose the slide to the sky where it will dimethylglyoxime be undisturbed for 24 hours. Examine the slide under high magnication. Look for spherical heater shiny bodies. Estimate the number of similar particles falling on the entire Earth in one day, 18 2 noting that the total surface area of Earth is 5.10x10 cm . Collect a sample of particles settling test tubes from the air onto a tray for a day or more. Weigh a small magnet to 0.1 mg. Sweep the tray medicine droppers with the magnet to pick up all magnetic particles. Weigh the magnet with iron particles. The beakers difference is the weight of presumed micrometeorites. Remove magnetic particles from magnet funnels with transparent tape. Using the values of weight or particles, area of the tray, and the area of Earths surface, calculate the mass of magnetic micrometeorites falling to Earth each year. filter paper 3. Test your micrometeorites for nickel metal. Since elemental nickel hardly ever occurs in terrestrial FIGURE 3.3 rock, the detection of nickel in a rock is a good test for a meteorite. Wearing goggles, rubber gloves, and Micrometeorites; scale bar on left is 200 microns, working in a hood, dissolve, in separate test tubes, less scale bar on right is 100 microns. than a gram of meteoritic rock, some iron, some nickel, and suspected micrometeorites in heated concentrated HCl. When dissolved, add a few drops of concentrated nitric acid. Immediately add several drops of citric acid to prevent the iron from precipitating. Neutralize with NH4OH. Filter the solution if it is not clear. Test for nickel by adding a few drops of a 1% alcohol solution of dimethylglyoxime. When nickel is present the solution turns a bright cherry red.
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Procedure:
You can calculate the energy of a moving object when you know the mass and velocity of the object. Use the equation: Kinetic Energy (in joules) = (0.50)(mass in kilograms)(velocity in meters/second squared), or K.E. = mv2. For example, suppose a 60-gram ball falling at a velocity of 2 meters per second splashes into a pond. How much energy was transferred from the ball to the pond at impact? Answer: K.E. = (0.50)(.06kg)(2meters/second)2 = 0.12 joules. Since there are 4180 joules in a (food) calorie, the energy released by this collision is equivalent to 0.0000029 calories Let us now calculate the energies of three sizes of rocks from space as they collide with Earth. 1. Most meteors (shooting stars) are mere specks, the size of grains of sand, when they crash into Earths atmosphere. But their energy is great enough to produce bright lights that streak across the sky. Suppose a particular micrometeorite entered the atmosphere as an iron/nickel sphere with a diameter of 1.0mm at a velocity of 32,000 meters/second. How much energy is released? 2. Suppose a fireball-producing meteor with a mass of 50 tons enters the atmosphere at 32,000 meters/second. How much energy will it release? 3. Suppose an iron/nickel asteroid six miles in diameter crashes into Earth at a velocity of FIGURE 3.4 32,000 meters/second. How much energy Meteor Crater in Arizona. of motion does it release to Earth? 4. The Arizona meteor crater formed in an instant about 50,000 years ago (Figure 3.4). Although the meteorite was vaporized on impact, scientists estimate that the meteorite had a mass of 63,000 tons, a diameter of about 80 feet and a velocity of 10 miles per second. About how much energy was transferred from meteorite to Earth during this collision?
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M AT E R I A L S :
sandbox sand crushed limestone assorted steel spheres electromagnet switch ruler video camera
Procedures:
1. Fill a sandbox (about 50cm by 100cm square), or a tiny tots wading pool, with fine grain sand to a depth of about 30cm. Support a rod about 2 meters above the sand. Fix an electromagnet above the sand with an off/on switch on the line (Figure 3.5). The magnet should be strong enough to support steel spheres of the various masses available. 2. Release a steel ball (by turning off the electromagnet) so it falls freely into the sand. Record the mass of the ball, the diameter of the ball, the height the ball falls, the diameter of the crater made, the depth of the crater, and the depth of the penetration of the ball into the sand. 3. Repeat the collisions using steel spheres of different sizes. Record all data. Search for relationships between masses and the results of the impacts. 4. Now repeat the tests changing the height the sphere falls. Calculate the energy of impact by measuring the mass of the sphere and its velocity at impact using K.E. (in Joules) = 1/2mv2. Terminal velocity of a free falling mass = 2gh. The kinetic energy of a 50g sphere falling from a height of 2.5m is (0.5)(0.05kg)(7m/ sec) = 0.175 Joules. What relationship can you see between energy and crater diameter?
FIGURE 3.5
Apparatus for simulating impacts.
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A N A LY S I S :
Attributes
Trial 1: Trial 2: Trial 3: Trial 4: Trial 5: Trial 1:
Mass of sphere
Crater diameter
5. If you become interested in studying ejecta patterns, you may want to substitute pulverized limestone for sand. The limestone holds together better than sand, and thus shows rays, secondary craters, and blankets or ejecta. The patterns of rays formed around craters can be more easily studied by sprinkling iron filings over the surface of the sand or limestone before impact. Preparing sand with alternating layers of colored sand enables the researcher to trace the ejection of sand at various depths from the impact site. Unfortunately the test mixes the sand, preventing one from reusing the sand in layers experiments. You should videotape these one-time events. Videotaping impacts is useful in observing the details of crater formation. Videotaping has the additional advantage of enabling the viewer to see events in slow motion. Crater specialists have a lot of questions to answer. One of their biggest problems is figuring out the size of a space rock from the diameter of the crater it left behind. From your laboratory experiment, what would you guess was the size of a meteorite that made the 1.2 kilometer in diameter crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago?
Crater depth
Trial 3: Trial 4: Trial 5: Trial 1: Trial 2: Trial 3: Trial 4: Trial 5: Trial 1: Trial 2: Trial 3: Trial 4: Trial 5: Trial 1: Trial 2:
Depth of penetration
Sand/ limestone
Eject patterns
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What happens when the energy of an asteroid or comet is released in the rock and atmosphere of Earth?
Procedure:
Table 3.1 records the diameters, locations, and ages of selected craters. 1. Search for a relationship between these impact craters and events in the history of life on Earth comparing them to the Geological Time Scale in Figure 3.2. 2. What events occurred around the times these large craters known as astroblemes or star wounds formed on Earths surface. 3. Close your eyes and imagine the crash of the asteroid or comet on South Africa about 250 million years ago. Where did all the energy of the giant meteorite go? How did the solid Earth respond physically? How did the atmosphere respond? What happened to the ice caps? The plants, animals, and other organisms? What percentage of living species do you think became extinct? Why do you think that many of the species which evolved after the cataclysm were different from those that lived before? 4. Create a piece of art that communicates the role of asteroid collisions in the evolution of Earth and life.
TA B L E 3 . 1
Selected List of Authenticated Impact Craters Worldwide.
More than 150 impact craters have been identified worldwide and newly identified craters continue to be added to the list each year. Almost all the structures exhibit a variety of evidence pointing to impact origin. Most are visible on the surface. The ten listed here are among the largest or the best known on the planet. The type of evidence is tabulated as follows: (1) shock metamorphism; (2) coesite or stishovite (rocks that formed by impact); (3) shatter cones; (4) raised rim or a central uplift; (5) ring structure; (6) shattered rock breccia or a breccia lens; (7) impact melt or impactite glass; (8) meteorites or meteoritic oxide.
Diameter (miles) 55.9 52.8 112 40.4 62.1 0.74 62.1 14.8 155 186
Evidence (type) 6 1 1, 6 2, 4, 6, 7 3, 5 1, 2, 3, 6 2, 6, 7 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 1, 3 2, 3, 6
Age (MYA) <450 35.5 + 0.6 64.98 + 0.05 <5 214 + 1 0.049 + .003 35 + 5 15 + 1 1850 + 3 2023 + 4
Chesapeake Bay
(Virginia, USA)
Chicxulub
(Yucatan, Mexico)
Kara-Kul
(Tajikistan)
Manicouagan Lake
(Quebec, Ontario)
Meteor Crater
(Arizona, USA)
Poigai Basin
(Siberia, Russia)
Ries Basin
(Bayern, Germany)
Sudbury Structure
(Ontario, Canada)
Vredefort Ring
(South Africa)
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FIGURE 4.1
Workers removing slabs of limestone bearing fossil fish at a quarry near Kemmerer, Wyoming
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FIGURE 4.2
Materials needed for excavating fossil fish.
FIGURE 4.3
Two techniques NOT to use with the dissecting needle.
You can find fish of various ages and lengths, from fish still in eggs to some in excess of one meter in length. There are 14 different genera and 20 different species found in Fossil Lake, from small fossil herring to the large gar (1.65 meters). In addition to the fish in the freshwater lake, there are snakes, turtles, alligators, birds, bats, and palm leaves, but they are quite rare compared to the fish. At other depths in the Fossil Lake limestone, fish are not nearly as abundant as in the 18 inch layer but they still show the diversity. It is thought that at the time the 18 inch layer was being deposited there were many mass fish deaths. To learn more about the fish and other organisms found in Fossil Lake, you might refer to the wellillustrated references of the fish of Fossil Lake in the list of readings. Your first time, uncovering your fish will take up to 30 hours of work, so work in short increments and enjoy your effort. If you are patient, your fossil fish may come out in excellent condition. You can exhibit your fish in a variety of ways: Frame it: hang it on a loop; or just lay it out. Professional preparers become so adept at it they can do a fish in less than an hour.
FIGURE 4.4
Uncovering the fossil in the slab.
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FIGURE 4.5
The finished product; a completely cleaned fossil fish.
Suggested reading:
Grande, L. 1984. Paleontology of the Green River formation, with a review of the fish fauna. Geological Survey of Wyoming Bulletin 63: 1333. Jackson, R. W. l988. The Fish of Fossil Lake: The Story of Fossil Butte National Monument. Dinosaur Nature Association and Natural Park Service. Piccini, S. 1997. Fossils of the Green River Formation. Italy: Geofin, s.r.l. Publishing House.
FIGURE 4.6
Two ways to mount your fossil fish.
Supplies:
Slabs may be purchased from the following companies: Creative Dimensions P.O. 1393 Bellingham, WA 98225 James and Carolyn Tinsky Green River Geological Laboratories Warfield, Wyoming Carl and Shirley Ulrich Fossil Station #308 Kemmerer, Wyoming 83101 www.ulrichsfossilgallery.com
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FIGURE 4.7
Steps in making a mold and cast of a fossil.
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FIGURE 4.8
Making a mold of a footprint.
fossil must be left uncoated so that the mold can be filled with plaster later. Allow to dry overnight, then brush on another coat. Be sure to thoroughly wash out the brush with soap and water after each coat. Repeat this process until you create a latex mold about 23 mm thick, which you peel off the original. Moisten the mold with water and then place mold in a can or other kind of stand. Fill with wet plaster of paris (Figure 4.7). Tap the filled mold sharply with a pencil or ruler to shake loose any bubbles that may have formed along the sides of the mold. Allow the plaster to set and harden (at least 30 minutes) and then peel off the mold from the cast. Once the cast has dried completely (usually several days) you can paint it to look like a natural fossil and then coat it with a very dilute mixture of water and white glue (such as Elmers Glue). The diluted glue should be thin enough that it soaks into the plaster easily. This coat will strengthen the cast and keep it from staining. To make a mold of a track, first make a dam about 1/2 to 1 inch high all around the track with clay (Figure 4.8). Brush oil or rub a thin layer of Vaseline over the track and then fill with wet plaster of paris. After the plaster has set, pry the mold off of the track. You can follow the same procedure to make a mold of a recent track in sand or mud. In this case however you do not need to coat the track with oil or grease but simply pour it onto the sediment.
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Microfossils
The term microfossil means small fossil which is usually defined as smaller than 1 millimeter in diameter. Some can be seen with a magnifying glass; others require microscopes to view them. Microfossils are very important in paleontology because they can be abundantly preserved in small samples such as ocean cores where larger fossils may be rare. Microfossils are often very widespread because ocean currents can carry them around the world. This wide distribution makes them excellent for correlating rocks on different continents. The organisms that comprise microfossils can be very simple or complex. Some are simple singlecelled organisms such as diatoms, radiolaria, and foraminifera. Others, such as ostracods, are complex multicelled animals. And still others, such as mollusks, are the larval or juvenile stages of organisms that are much larger as adults. In this section we will review some of the common organisms that make up the microfossils and how you can collect them. There are a huge number of species of microorganisms. Phytoplankton, the FIGURE 4.9 photosynthesizing single-celled organisms that float in the seas, are the basis for the oceanic Some representative examples of diatoms. food chain and are very numerous and diverse. Zooplankton, the tiny animals that float in the ocean, often eat phytoplankton and are themselves food for many larger animals. In this activity, we will focus only on small organisms that have shells and are commonly preserved as fossils and that can be seen with a magnifying glass or a low power microscope. Diatoms are single-celled photosynthetic organisms that live in both fresh and salt water. They may make up the bulk of the phytoplankton in some parts of the ocean and the concentrated deposits of their shells form diatomaceous earth. Their shell is made of silica (glass) and is structured like a pillbox, with two halves, one of which fits inside the other. They are very intricate and beautiful (Figure 4.9). You can observe living diatoms as well as nonmineralized phytoplankton and zooplankton by making your own plankton net (see instructions for making inexpensive plankton net below).
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FIGURE 4.10
Some representative examples of foraminifera.
Foraminifera, or forams, are single-celled organisms that are much like amoebas with shells. The shells are usually made of calcium carbonate, but may also be constructed of sand grains or other particles that have been glued together. The shells consist of one or more chambers and comprise a wide variety of shapes (Figure 4.10). Forams live inside their shell and capture food by means of fine hair-like extensions of their protoplasm that extend through small holes in the shell. Some forams look much like small snails, but forams are smaller than most juvenile snails and snail shells do not have chambers. Ostracods are very small crustaceans (related to shrimp and crabs) that live inside a bivalved shell that looks like a small peanut shell or kidney bean (Figure 4.11). They are multicelled and much more complex than diatoms and forams in that they have internal organs, legs, antennae, etc. The shells separate after death. The shells are composed of calcium carbonate and may be smooth or ornamented. Mollusks are also complex multicelled animals that comprise the Gastropoda (snails), Bivalvia (clams), Cephalopoda (squids and octopus), as well as some other groups. Most mollusks are larger than 1.00 mm, but their juvenile and larval shells are often found in
FIGURE 4.11
Internal and external views of a living ostracod (left) and two examples of ostracod shells (right).
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sediment along with other microfossils. Forams sometimes bear a superficial resemblance to gastropods, but gastropods do not have chambers like forams (Figure 4.12).
Collecting microfossils:
Because they are so small, microfossils are difficult to handle. One good way to pick them up is to use a fine tip camel hair paintbrush (a 00000 or 5 zero size works well). Moisten the tip with water and touch it to the fossil. The water in the brush will pick up the fossil by surface tension and you can then transfer it to a small petri dish. You can also make a permanent mounting on cardboard or paper. Take an index card or piece of stiff paper (black or another dark color is best for highlighting the fossils) and rub it with a water-soluble glue stick (e.g. Pritt or UHU brands). After the glue has dried, pick up the microfossil with a moistened brush as described above. Gently place the fossil onto the glued surface while at the same time working the wet brush tip into the glue to soften it and hold the fossil. Arrange the fossils according to species and group them in lines across the card.
FIGURE 4.12
Relative sizes of typical forams and ostracods in relation to larval and juvenile mollusks in a microfossil sample.
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TEACHERS NOTES:
The first exercise in this activity involves blocks. If the students cut the blocks themselves, then foam or Styrofoam would make good raw materials. Each student in the class can attempt this work, or one student can do it and the finished project can serve as demonstration. The idea is to construct a tower with the same width and depth but various size stories depending on the eras to be demonstrated. When the slices are stacked together they will give a three dimensional picture of the duration of geological time. We provide measurements for a tower 4 foot 7 inches tall. One foot equals one billion years, and 1 inch equals one billion years/12 or 83,000,000 years. The scale should be small enough so they can be handled readily, but large enough to give adequate representation to the shorter period of time. The scale used in this model satisfies both requirements. Students can get some math practice by inventing their own scales using the calculations included in this activity.
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TA B L E 5 . 1
Great moments in Earth history.
Values given for a tower of wood blocks calibrated at 1 foot to a billion years and a string of time calibrated to 10 million years to the inch and 1 million years to the millimeter.
Blocks
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4.6 billion years (by) or 4,600 million years (my): Origin of Earth. Asteroids and meteors coalesce into the proto-Earth, gradually adding to the mass of the planet. Meteorites generally yield dates of 4.6 by, since they are bits of debris floating 4,600mm around in space that never stuck to a planet. If you buy a meteorite at a rock shop and bring it to class, you can tell kids that they have touched the oldest thing in the entire solar system (see Chapter 3, Activity 1: Searching for Micrometeorites). 4,000mm 4.0 by: Oldest dated rock. 3,800mm 3,500mm 650mm 545mm 425mm 380mm 245mm 210mm 145mm 65mm 0.1mm 3.8 by: First evidence of life on Earth. This evidence is in the form of a chemical signature and not actual fossils, so there is some doubt about its validity. 3.5 by: First fossils. These are single-celled prokaryotes (bacteria) preserved in chert. 650 my: First animals. All soft-bodied (no skeletons). Some look like jellyfish or sea pens. 545 my: Beginning of the Cambrian Period and the Paleozoic Era. First shelled animals; trilobites, brachiopods, and others. 425 my: First land plants. 380 my: First land vertebrates (amphibians). 245 my: End of the Permian Period and Paleozoic Era and beginning of the Triassic Period and Mesozoic Era. Greatest extinction of the last 500 million years. About 96% of all species wiped out. 210 my: Beginning of the Jurassic Period. 145 my: Beginning of the Cretaceous Period. 65 my: Beginning of the Cenozoic Era and extinction of the dinosaurs. 100,000 yrs: Oldest modern human, Homo sapiens.
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FIGURE 5.1
Scale model of tower of blocks representing Earth history.
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Theropod Dinosaur
Archaeopteryx
Chicken
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FIGURE 6.2
Evolution of dinosaur to birds
modern bird, a chicken (Gallus domesticus), and with a presumed dinosaur-relative, Compsognathus (Figure 6.1). We will compare the three animals as skeletons because that is the only form the remains of the 150-million-years-old Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus occur. Each skeleton is in a circle that includes the characteristics of the animal. Each smaller enclosed circle represents the additional characteristics that set that animal apart from its ancestor. Therefore Archaeopteryx has flight feathers in addition to three primary toes in the feet and a wishbone. Find other traits that distinguish Archaeopteryx from its dinosaur ancestor and the chicken from Archaeopteryx (There are more than those listed.). The intermediate position of Archaeopteryx between the modern bird and the nonavian dinosaur is fairly obvious in the characteristics it shares with each. Archaeopteryx is about as much a half dinosaur and a half bird as one could find. Yet it clearly represents a missing link between the bird and the dinosaur. As such it occupies the position in the evolutionary boundary between the thousands of species of living birds and extinct dinosaurs. The evolution of dinosaurs and birds can be viewed in Figure 6.2. The discovery of one species of fossil can suggest a major shift in the thinking about the course evolution has taken. But the appearance of Archaeopteryx has raised far more questions about the origin of bird flight than it has answered. What was the origin of birds? What is the ancestry of Archaeopteryx? How did bird flight evolve? Could Archaeopteryx fly? And how? From the ground or from the tree? How well? Could it perch in a tree using its hallux? What was its diet?
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Then there was the question concerning what Archaeopteryx looked like when it was alive. Its restoration when shown with Compsognathus takes a bit of creative imagination, as in the illustration of the animal by the shore of the Tethys Sea about 150 million years ago (Figure 6.3). You can see that though their skeletons were quite similar, their bodies appeared to be different. How much of the difference was the addition of feathers to the body cover?
FIGURE 6.3
Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus 150 mya at Solnhofen
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Homology
Ever since vertebrates crawled out of the sea, they had a similarity of body structure resulting from a commonality of ancestry known as homology. Such signs of evolution are called homologous structures. The bones of the forelimbs of vertebrates are constructed from the same skeletal elements in all vertebrates, from the coelacanth fish to modern man. The basic architecture is seen in the makeup of all vertebrates
FIGURE 6.4
Bones in the forelimbs of vertebrate animals.
Sauripterus
Eryops
Seymouria Archaeopterx
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FIGURE 6.5
The embryos of a chicken (left) and a human (right).
from emerging fish, amphibians, reptiles, sea lizards, crocodiles, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals (Figure 6.4). The bones of the forelimbs are scapula, humerus, radius, ulna, carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges. Each animal has the same general architecture but the forelimbs are modified for different functions depending on the needs of the animal. These functions may include running, walking, climbing, flying, swimming, seizing food, and mating. Skeletal specializations lead to the survival of different species of animals. All organs in the vertebrate body have homologous structures that have been modified by evolution, causing changes in the bodies to adapt to different environmental factors. The skin, kidneys, vascular system, and digestive system of all animals are constantly changing as the animals adapt to changing environments. We know that anatomical structures have changed dramatically from their earlier forms, but we have no clear evidence. The fossils of most species have not been preserved. We can infer changes by observing embryos, or
FIGURE 6.6
Crests on the heads of duckbill dinosaurs.
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FIGURE 6.7
Forelimbs of Deinonychus, Struthiomimus, Triceratops, and Tyrannosaurus.
Deinonychus Struthiomimus Triceratops T. rex
FIGURE 6.8
we can see organs that have become vestigial. Or we can infer what the kidney was like in a fish or in an amphibian, but we dont have the clear fossil proof we get from the hard fossil bones that endure millions of years in the crust of Earth. Bones are the most durable and revealing fossil evidence. Nevertheless, embryos suggest much of the evolutionary history of vertebrates. Compare the embryo of the chicken with the embryo of the human (Figure 6.5). In both the embryos, note gill pouches and the post anal tail. In each embryo, the homologous pouches will develop into structures other than gill pouches (though in fish and amphibians they will develop into gill pouches). The tails of fish and most vertebrates develop prominent external tails, but in most birds and apes, the tail is not an external structure, even though the embryo A human and Brachiosaurus.
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has a prominent tail. Homologous structures become modified or disappear during the embryological development of the animal. Lets take the dinosaurs for example. For over 200 million years they adapted to conditions from pole to pole, from mountains, to deserts, and to jungles. In that interval, every force in nature acted upon them to produce a diversity of structure. For example, the crests of duckbill dinosaurs show a remarkable diversity that is probably related to display in order to attract mates (Figure 6.6) The forelimbs of dinosaurs also became specialized for particular functions (Figure 6.7). The forelimbs of Deinonychus and Struthiomimus were slender and flexible for grasping, while those of Triceratops were thick and strong for supporting its great weight. There is some controversy surrounding the purpose of the forelimbs in Tyrannosaurus. Though they have claws and look like they might have been useful for grasping things, the arms were too short to reach the mouth! Can you think of what FIGURE 6.9 purpose they might have served? Dinosaurs also varied tremendously in Skeleton of juvenile Mussasaurus. size. For example Brachiosaurus, the largest of the sauropod dinosaurs, weighed over 70 tons (Figure 6.8), while the skeleton of Mussasaurus, one of the smallest sauropods, fits in two human hands (Figure 6.9).
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Allosaurus Hinge in lower jaw Wishbone Bipedal Retractable sickle claw Backward-pointing pubis Number of fingers Third metatarsal foot Anklebone Tip of ischium Yes Yes Yes No No 3 Unpinched Short Expanded
Albertosaurus Tyrannosaurus Yes Yes Yes No No 2 Pinched Tall Pointed Yes Yes Yes No No 2 Pinched Tall Pointed
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We note that the four carnivorous dinosaurs share three common characteristics: a hinge in the middle of the lower jaw, a wishbone, and bipedal upright stance. These are some of their primitive characteristics that they share with their common ancestor. Two characteristics are unique in Deinonychus: a retractable claw and a backward-pointing pubis. These two features must have appeared after the ancestor of Deinonychus evolved from the other three. Then there are four derived characteristics that arose somewhere in the course of time. So let us now draw a cladogram for the four carnivorous dinosaurs, keeping in mind that the best hypothesis is the one with the fewest number of evolutionary changes (Figure 6.10). Traits 1, 2, and 3 are primitive traits common to each of the four animals. At juncture c, Allosaurus branches off and the remaining three continue. Then the anklebone becomes tall and the tip of the ischium becomes pointed in all of the remaining three animals. At point b Deinonychus branches out and the animals derive retractable sickle claws and a backward-pointing pubis. The remaining animals continue to change by developing two fingers instead of three, and a pinched third metatarsal in the foot. At point a Albertosaurus branches off, and Tyrannosaurus continues on. This is the best hypothesis with the data at hand. But more data can come from new discoveries of fossils and additional characteristics.
FIGURE 6.10
Cladogram for Allosaurus, Deinonychus, Albertosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus.
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FIGURE 6.11
A cladogram showing the position of the dinosaur among the four-limbed vertebrates.
Lepidosauromorpha
The questions below refer to Figure 6.11. 1. Which is the first vertebrate to appear on land? What is its distinctive feature? Name one living animal example. 2. What animal group developed an amniotic egg? How many of the seven animal groups produce an amniotic egg? Which animal did not produce an amniotic egg? 3. How do the skulls of Anapsida (tortoises and turtles), Lepidosauromorpha (lizards and snakes), and Pseudosuchia (crocodile) differ from one another? If you had a skull of each, how would tell them apart? 4. The hinged ankle is an added characteristic of the Tetrapoda, the Amniote, the Reptilia, the Diapsida and the Archosauria. But these animals still do not stand upright on their hind legs. What is the genetic trait that makes this possible and characterizes a new and successful species? 5. According to this scheme of classification, who are your closest relatives from among the seven units of classification. Does this surprise you?
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FIGURE 6.12
A basic cladogram of the relationships among the major groups of dinosaurs.
Pachycephalosauria
The questions below refer to Figure 6.12. 1. The rst branching of the dinosaurs leads to the order Ornithischia. The rst one is Pisanosaurus, and the last one before the extinction of the dinosaurs is ________________. The special traits of this family were found to have an advanced social system with extended care of the offspring. What did each species eat? 2. The second branching produced the order Saurischia all lizard-hipped dinosaurs. They produced the giant Sauropod, which grew larger and larger. Diplodocidae, Brachiosauridae, and Titanosauria were the familiar animals that achieved a highly social life producing eggs, childcare, and family units. How do you account for the increasing care given to offspring by the parents? 3. We then come to the suborder Theropoda, which are the bird-footed carnivorous dinosaurs. The third branch, turning to the left, is the family Compsognathidae, a small Saurischian dinosaur and including many of the small raptors. Many of these dinosaurs are found with feathers. And some of the feathered dinosaurs (birds) could fly. When all the dinosaurs became extinct, the birds took over. Can you imagine a bird as a kind of dinosaur? 4. This section of the cladogram put Deinonychosauria farther out than the position of the family of Tyrannosauroidea. In fact, there is a great distance between the two. In gure 6.10 their position is reversed, with Deinonchosauria with sickle claws, the third metatarsal tarsal unpinched, three ngers and backward pointing pubis. How do you explain this?
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5. Archaeopteryx, the famous bird found in Jurassic rock formation, was discovered in rock along with fossils of the dinosaur Compsognathus, a small bird-like creature whose skeleton was mistaken for Archaeopteryx. In fact, some early paleontologists were not able to distinguish their skeletons when the fossil of Archaeopteryx did not show an imprint of their feathers. What do you consider the signicance of this fact?
Holtz, T.R., Jr. 2002. Chasing Tyrannosaurus and Deinonychus around the tree of life: Classifying dinosaurs. In Dinosaurs: The science behind the stories, eds. J. G. Scotchmoor, D. A. Springer, B. H. Breithaupt, and A. F. Fiorillo, 3138. Alexandria: American Geological Institute.
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Ceratopsia was their forward speed powered by strong leg muscles. With its head down it could drive its horns into the belly of a menacing Tyrannosaurus. In the 15 million years the Ceratopsia lived in North America, they were a rapidly evolving suborder. There were at least seven genera and several dozen species, with each genus going extinct about each 5 million years. That is an extremely fast rate of evolution. The one characteristic that appeared to dominate the body of the Ceratopsia in the closing moments of the Cretaceous Period were the horns and the ramming speed of the body. (Others contend the horns were a sexual selection trait.) Triceratops made up 80% of the horned dinosaurs at the close of the Cretaceous Period. About 80 million years ago, there were at least three genera of Ceratopsia and possibly 5 species of each one. About 75 to 70 mya there were at least two genera of Ceratopsia and about 5 species of each. Then about 70 to 65 mya, there were at least two genera and about 5 species of each one. About 65 million years ago, all of the Ceratopsia, and the entire remaining dinosaurs, became extinct. Even the Triceratops with its Tyrannosaurus killing horns, its neck-shield, its two-ton body powered by muscular legs, and beak and teeth that rendered tree trunks into granular meal, could not survive the ultimate extinction of the dinosaurs. Everyone wonders why the dinosaurs did not survive. Why did the crocodile, the turtle, and the clam survive instead? These acquired food, withstood adverse weather and climate, and predators and airborne toxins did not molest them. One difference between the dinosaurs and the crocodiles and the turtles was that the Ceratopsia was changing genera every 5 million years and the other was changing genera every 35 millions years.
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The ages of the reptiles, the archosaurs (dinosaurs, pterosaurs and crocodiles), and the therapsids (mammals)
Beginning during the Permian Period, we see the reptiles coming into prominence and becoming the dominant vertebrate present. Along with the therapsids (mammals), they make their appearance during the Permian and become the dominant fauna during the Triassic Period. During the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods another group, the dinosaurs,
FIGURE 7.1
Diagram showing the terrestrial ecological niches dominated by the Archosauria.
Adapted from Archosauria: A New Look at the Old Dinosaur, by J. C. McLoughlin. Viking, 1979.
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FIGURE 7.2
Relative proportions of Reptiles, Therapsids/Mammals, and Archosaurs through time.
Adapted from Archosauria: A New Look at the Old Dinosaur, by J. C. McLoughlin. Viking, 1979.
then replaced the therapsids as the dominant group of animals. The group of dinosaurs evolved from the reptiles in the early Triassic Period and forced the reptiles to a lesser role in life. Dinosaurs then dominated Earth for about 170 million years. Then something happened rather suddenly about 65 million years ago. The dinosaurs and pterosaurs disappeared, except for the crocodiles and the birds. The Cenozoic Era brought the mammal back as the dominant animal in the Age of Mammals. This relationship is illustrated in Figure 7.1. As the Triassic Period opened the reptiles diversified into the crocodiles, the pterosaurs, and the dinosaurs (Figure 7.2). It started with the crocodiles, with three orders: the Protosuchia, the Mesosuchia, and the Eusuchia; the Pterosauria, with two orders: Rhamphorynchoidea and the Pterodactyloidea; the Dinosauria with five orders of bird-hipped (Ornithischia): the Ceratopsia, the Hadrosauria, the Ornithopoda, the Stegosauria, and the Ankylosauria; and the Dinosauria with three orders of lizard-hipped (Saurischia): the Sauropoda, the Carnosauria, and the Coelurosauria; and the birds of the class Aves. At about the 65-million-year mark the living dinosaurs and their Archosauria relative, the Pterosauria, became extinct (Figure 7.2). Only the birds and the
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TA B L E 7 . 1
Taxonomic hierarchy of the dinosaurs
Kingdom Phylum
Animalia Chordata Class Class Reptilia Synapsida Order Order Class Sub Class Order Order Order Order Sub Class Order Order Order Order\Class Order Order Family Pelycosauria (Dimetridon) Therapsida (Cynognathus) Ornithischia Hadrosauria Ornithopoda Ankylosauria Stegosauria Saurischia Sauropoda Carnosauria Coelurosauria Aves Pterosauria Crocodilia (such as) Hadrosauridae and Stegosauridae
Archaesauria
crocodiles survived. The crocodiles and the birds survived possibly because their terrestrial niche was water and air. At the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, about 65 million years ago, the land habitats were devoid of large vertebrates, but not for long. The mammals (the Therapsida of the Permian Period and early Mesozoic Era) soon exploded on Earth into about every environmental niche. We quickly shifted from the Age of the Dinosaurs on land and the Age of Pterosaurs in the air to the Age of Mammals on land and the Age of Birds in the air. So today we have a few reptiles (snakes, lizards, and turtles), a few crocodiles, and several hundred thousand species of birds and mammals adapted to the land, sea, and air.
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___11. Protoceratops ___12. Triceratops ___13. Styrcosaurus ___14. Monoclonius This is a matching exercise in which you are to match the name of the dinosaur with its translation. Taxonomists use Latin or Greek in scientific names of organisms. Latin and ancient Greek are dead languages and the vocabulary will not change with time. Scientists across the globe use the same dead language to name organisms. A language genius can get seven or more correct without help from reference books. Write the correct corresponding letter in the space next to the number. ___15. Ceratopsia ___16. Allosaurus ___17. Tyrannosaurus ___18. Diplodocus ___19. Brachiosaurus ___10. Brontosaurus ___11. Hypsilophodon ___12. Archaeopteryx ___13. Compsognathus ___14. Ceolophysis ___15. Ornithischia ___16. Ornithopoda ___17. Ornithosuchus ___18. Saurornithoides ___19. Seymouria ___20. Struthiomimus ___21. Ankylosaurus ___22. Kentrosaurus ___23. Stegosaurus ___24. Psittacosaurus ___25. Saltopus ___26. Pachycephalosaurus ___27. Gorgosaurs ___28. Hadrosaurus ___29. Plateosaurus ___30. Parasaurolophus ___31. Longisquamata ___32. Comptosaurus ___33. Iguanodon
a. weird lizard b. stiffened lizard c. old wing d. armed lizard e. chambered lizard f. flexible lizard g. dragging lizard h. horned lizard i. hollow boned j. elegant jawed k. double beamed l. horrible lizard m. big lizard n. high crested tooth o. iguano tooth p. pointed lizard q. long scale r. one horned s. bird hips t. bird feet u. tyrant lizard w. thick headed x. sort of crested y. bird feet z. parrot lizard aa. flat lizard bb. bird crocodile cc. early horned face dd. leaping foot ee. lizard-like bird ff. plated lizard gg. three horned lizard hh. ostrich mimic
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James Jensen of Brigham Young University uncovered two giant sauropods in 1972 and 1979 in Colorado. In 1972 he found one dinosaur that he recognized was an enlarged form of Diplodocus, which he named Supersaurus. But then in 1979 he discovered a larger member of the Brachiosauridae family, a giant of an animal that made the others seem small. He named it Ultrasaurus macIntosh in 1985. The taxonomy of the species is
FIGURE 7.3
Drawing of the skeleton of Brachiosaurus on display in the Humboldt Museum in Berlin, Germany (right), and a drawing of the forelimb and scapula from Ultrasaurus (left).
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FIGURE 7.4
Reconstruction of Brachiosaurus.
Class: Dinosauria Subclass: Sauropodomorpha Order: Sauropoda Suborder: Titanosauria Family: Brachiosauridae Genus: Ultrasaurus Species: macIntosh Period: Late Jurassic Age: Kimmeridgian-Tithonian 144156 MYA Body Parts Found: Dorsal Vertebrae and a shoulder blade Sauropods fed by stripping the leaves of evergreen trees. Presumably the sauropods grew taller as the trees grew. The front legs of sauropods grew longer than the hind legs to support the longer and heavier neck that reached upwards. The body sloped downward to the smaller legs and the tail of the animals. The neck of the animal rose like a crane and was supported by many cables and lightweight vertebrae. The head of the sauropod was small, consisting of a mouth with peg-like teeth adapted for stripping 5001,000 pounds of leaves a day. The nostrils were on the roof of the skull, presumably to allow the animal to eat and breathe without interference. They traveled in a herd and probably knew few enemies, although when they died their bodies were an obvious feast for the carnivores. Since few eggs have ever been found, some paleontologists think that sauropods may have given live birth to their young. The largest assembled Brachiosaurus in the world is in the Humboldt Museum in Germany. It is 39 feet tall at the shoulder. It is 74 feet long from head to tail. And it is estimated to have weighed 77 tons! James Jensen has estimated Ultrasaurus macIntosh to be 1/3 larger than Brachiosaurus; that would be 60 feet tall at the shoulder, 98 feet long from head to tail, and a weight of 135 tons. Figure 7.3 shows a mounted skeleton of the Brachiosaurus from Tendaguru, Tanzania, Africa. Beside this skeleton is the left front leg of Ultrasaurus macIntosh from the feet to the scapula, a total height of 60 feet. Compare the leg of each animal to get a sense of the difference in size. Figure 7.4 illustrates what the Brachiosaurus may have looked like in the flesh. Your task is to draw, sculpt, or sketch Brachiosaurus and Ultrasaurus together, showing their differences in size as they stand in the Jurassic forest.
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TA B L E 7 . 2 .
Global Dinosaur Distribution
Era Late Triassic (235208 mya) Geographic Locale Countries where dinosaurs lived
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North America Canada (Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia); United States (Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah) Europe Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Scotland, Switzerland, Wales Greater Asia China, India South America Brazil, Argentina Africa Lesotho, Madagascar, Morocco, South Africa Australasia Australia North America Canada (Nova Scotia); United States (Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Utah, Wyoming); Mexico Europe England, France, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Sweden Greater Asia China, India, Iran South America Brazil, Venezuela Africa Algeria, Lesotho, Morocco, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe Antarctica trans-Antarctic Mountains Europe England, France, Portugal, Scotland Greater Asia China South America Argentina, Chile Africa Morocco, Algeria Australasia Australia North America United States (Alaska, Colorado, Montana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wyoming) Europe England, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland Greater Asia China, India, Thailand South America Argentina, Chile, Columbia Africa Madagascar, Malawi, Morocco, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe Australasia New Zealand North America Canada (British Colombia); United States (Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wyoming) Europe Belgium, Croatia, England, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain Greater Asia China, Georgia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, South Korea, Thailand South America Argentina, Brazil, Chile Africa Algeria, Cameroon, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Sudan, South Africa, Tunisia, Zambia, Zimbabwe Australasia Australia North America Canada (Alberta, British Colombia, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, Yukon Territory); Honduras, Mexico, United States (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wyoming) Europe Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, England, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Ukraine Greater Asia China, India, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Mongolia, Russia, Syria, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan South America Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay Africa Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, Niger, South Africa Australasia New Zealand Antarctica Antarctic peninsula
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that occupied the open plains of central Canada and United States were enormous animals, but fossils of the same animal found in what is today Romania (then an island in Europe) were small, an illustration of Island Dwarfism. In Australia, when it was farther south than it is today, it presented a cool climate to its dinosaurs, at 70 to 85 degrees south latitude. As a result, these dinosaurs were much smaller then the ones that lived in more temperate regions. But that is only part of the story. At the Antarctic Circle the daylight is very long during the austral summer and very short during the austral winter. The dinosaur Leaellynasaurs brain was covered with a very large optic lobe. This suggested it may have evolved a heightened sense of vision during the extended darkness of the polar winter. Of even more significance, over their 170 million years of life on Earth, the dinosaurs developed a social life that including caring for young and maintaining protection for the entire tribe. You can begin your study paleobiogeography by referring to Table 7.2 (page 97). 1. First note which states have rock close to the surface of the ground that contain dinosaur fossils. 2. Which states are near where you live? If you have none close, obtain a map of rock formations for your state. Look for Late Triassic; Early, Middle, and Late Jurassic; and Early and Late Cretaceous. 3. Describe where rock formation from each period is located relative to the others. 4. Describe the thickness of the rocks from each period (the total depth of all six of the period-specic rock formations). 5. If there is no Triassic to Cretaceous rock in your state, nd out what happened to it. If you live in Hawaii, the land did not exist then. But how about Florida and Ohio? Is it possible that the record for 170 million years of dinosaurs fossils could have been washed away into the sea? 6. What could be done to look for fossils that lie well beneath the rock surface? Maps can be obtained from the geological survey office in your state, your librarian may help find some, the internet is a good source, or ask your geology teacher.
Forster, C. 2002. Where dinosaurs roamed the Earth. In Dinosaurs: The science behind the stories, eds. J. G. Scotchmoor, D. A. Springer, B. H. Breithaupt, and A. F. Fiorillo, pp. 4552. Alexandria: American Geological Institute.
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Measuring diversity
We have heard a lot about the global biodiversity crisis and the loss of countless species. What is diversity? How is it measured? How do you determine the diversity of an environment like a rain forest or a marine bay? The most obvious measure is simply the number of species present in an environment. This is called species richness. The species richness of a sample would be the number of species present in that sample. How do you measure the diversity of an environment? If the environment is large, like a rain forest, you cant actually go and count all the species because it would take too long (besides, the animals wouldnt hold still!). So scientists take a sample that they hope will be representative of the community. You might do this by counting all species within a 10 square foot area or counting all the species that you encountered as you walked a straight line from one end of the environment to the other. Obviously a sample will not include all the species in the environment because many species are rare and present in only a few locations, or present only during certain times of the year (such as migratory birds).
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The community above has 8 species (species richness is 8) and 75 individuals. Put all the paper squares into a box or large can and pick out a square, only looking at it after you have taken it out of the box. Write down the color of the square and return it to the box. Now pick out another square, record the color and return it to the box. Continue this until a sample of five pieces has been recorded. What is the number of species found so far? Now pick five more pieces, returning each to the box after you pick, and add the results to the previous sample. Now how many species have you found? Pick ten more. What happens to the total number of species recorded? It gets larger. This means that the diversity you find in a sample will get larger if you pick a larger sample. So now we have three different samples of the same community and three different diversity values (species richness) because each sample is a different size (sample sizes of 5, 10 and 20 individuals). Did you find all eight of the species in your samples? Probably not. In real life, you never truly know the diversity of a community until you have counted every individual.
Comparing diversities
Biologists often want to compare diversities between different environments (like comparing a tropical rain forest with a temperate rain forest) or see how the diversity of an environment has changed over time (Is the diversity of the city park less now than it was 30 years ago?). Likewise, a paleontologist might want to know the diversity of an environment before and after extinction. Suppose you are a biologist and you want to know if the animal diversity of the wetland near your house has changed in the last 50 years. You fence off an area so that no animals can get in or out, and you spend all day catching and counting every animal in that area. At the end of this process, you have recorded 209 individuals and 15 species. You then go to the library and find that in 1942, a biologist took a sample of 43 individuals and found 13 species. At first you might think that the sample taken in 1942 was less diverse, but your sample is more than twice the size of the 1942 sample, and you have already seen how sample size can affect your diversity measure. How can you compare these differently sized samples? There is a simple equation that allows us to compare diversities from different sample sizes. It is: S-1/Log N Where S = number of species and N = number of individuals in the sample. If we apply this equation to the problem above we find that your sample of 15 species and 209 individuals works out to: 15-1/log of 209 = 14/2.3 = 6.5 species
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Now apply the equation to the 1942 sample of 13 species and 43 individuals: 13-1/log of 43 = 12/1.6 = 7.5 species Therefore, the 1942 sample, which only has 13 species, seems to represent a larger community than the recent sample, which has 15 species.
FIGURE 7.5
Visual depiction of the pieces of paper representing two communities.
Put each community into a coffee can or box and mix them up and then dump them onto a table top into separate piles (Figure 7.5). Which community looks more diverse? Community 1 does not look very diverse because most of the squares are red. Community 2 looks more colorful, and therefore more diverse, even though it has a lower species richness. Think about it this way: Imagine each color is a different food; red is a hotdog, black is an egg, etc. If each community represents
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your menu, which will seem less diverse? When all the species of a community are represented by nearly equal numbers of individuals, we usually think of that community as being more diverse than one where one species is very abundant and dominates the environment (even if the second community actually has more species). Because of this, some measures of diversity include a way of counting the number of individuals of each species as well as the total number of species. One commonly used measure of species diversity that includes proportions of individuals is represented by the Shannon-Weaver equation, which is: H(S) = - p i ln p i where p i is the proportion of species i in the community and ln is the natural logarithm. The table below illustrates how this is calculated. pi Sample 1 0.90 0.04 0.03 0.02 0.01 S= -0.453 Sample 2 0.46 0.26 0.16 0.09 0.03 S= -1.33 Sample 3 0.20 0.20 0.20 0.20 0.20 S= -1.600 ln p i -.0105 -3.219 -3.506 -3.912 -4.605 H(S)= 0.45 -0.798 -1.347 -1.832 -2.408 -3.506 H(S)= 1.33 -1.600 -1.600 -1.600 -1.600 -1.600 H(S)= 1.60 -0.320 -0.320 -0.320 -0.320 -0.320 -0.367 -0.350 -0.293 -0.218 -0.105 p i ln p i -0.095 -0.129 -0.105 -0.078 -0.046
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Each sample above represents 100 individuals. The first column represents the proportion of individuals for each species (Sample 1 has 90 individuals of the first species, 4 individuals of the second, etc.). The second column represents the log of this number and the third column represents the product of the first two columns. Note that even though all three samples have the same number of species (five) and the same number of individuals, they have widely different Shannon-Weaver diversity indices. The evenly distributed Sample 3 has a much higher diversity that the very dominated Sample 1. We call Sample 1 dominated by one species and Sample 3 equitable.
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Fossils in Society
Fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) make up over 80% of our energy sources. They are called fossil fuels because they all come from ancient organic matter that has been buried and then heated over a long period of time. These fuel sources take so long to form that they are not renewable and there is much discussion now as to what will replace them when they, especially oil and natural gas, are expended. Activity 1 (Coal, petroleum, and natural gas) describes the origins and processes of formation of the fossil fuels and guides students in an investigation of the properties of coal and its younger brother, peat. Activity 2 (Making thin peels of coal balls to view ancient plants) examines the actual plant fossils in coal balls and makes an important link between fossils of the past and our energy needs today.
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FIGURE 8.1
U.S. energy flow for 2001. U.S Energy Flow, 2001
Source: Energy Information Administration. U.S. Dept. of Energy. Monthly Energy Review. August 2002: in quadrillion BTUs
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The U.S. exported 3.89 x 10 BTUs, which leaves 96.34 X 10 BTUs for consumption. The public used the energy in three ways: residential (19.27 x 10 BTUs), commercial and industrial (50.18 x 10 BTUs), and transportation (26.90 x 10 BTUs). Coal, natural gas, and crude oil are called fossil fuels. Coal came from extinct and ancient land plants that died and fell into swamps. Gas and oil originated from microorganisms that lived in the sea or fresh water and settled to the bottom at death and did not rot in the stagnant water. If the vegetation falls into the swamp and immediately is covered by the deep water, the plant materials will not rot, but will begin the long process of turning into coal. If an entire tree falls into a stagnant swamp, the tree sinks and little of the tree will rot. At first, the plant material becomes peat, then it compresses to lignite, then under continuous pressure, changes to bituminous coal, and finally becomes anthracite coal. The original mass of peat will compress to less than 1/25 of its original volume. In the Carboniferous Period of the swamps, a reasonably pure coal could be produced if a little sediment accumulated in the swamp at the same time. Oil and methane also come from organic material, but it is not as clear as the origin of coal. Petroleum comes from marine sediments. Dark organic-rich shale is the probable source. The Black Sea is accumulating mud that is 35% organic, compared to the mud in the Atlantic Ocean with an average of 2.5% organic material in ordinary sediments. In normal marine sediment the organic material is oxidized, but in stagnant bottom water it can accumulate. The situation is very similar to the formation of coal. As with coals deep burial, much time and some heat are required to make oil and gas. Once formed, it must migrate to permeable rock from which it is extracted. Not all oil forms in marine rocks. The oil shale of the Rocky Mountains area, which contains a large percentage of our petroleum resources, formed in freshwater lakes, probably by the same process. Obtain some samples of peat, lignite, bituminous coal, anthracite coal, and coke. 1. Look for fossil plant life in the fossil material. 2. How has the fossil plant material changed as it became older? 3. Coke is made by heating coal in a container by a process called destructive distillation, driving off the volatile gas and leaving the carbon in the container. The carbon coke has many uses, one of which is to pull oxygen out of metal in a renery furnace. This can be demonstrated in the laboratory. 4. How well do the different types of coal fuel burn? 5. How do bituminous and anthracite coal compare in weight, hardness, luster, flame, and as a fuel?
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Introduction
During the Carboniferous Period, about 250350 million years ago, plant material which fell to the swampy forest floor decayed, became compacted, and turned into the amorphous substance which time, pressure, and heat transformed into coal. Some of the plant material, however, became saturated with CaCO3 and other salts, which filled the interior of, and area between, the cells. As this hardened to stone, the cellulose of the cell walls was preserved and embedded in limestone. This limestone concretion, the coal ball, is formed in coal seams and constitutes a nuisance to mining operations. Discarded by the industry, the preserved material comprises an important key to understanding the detailed structure of carboniferous plants. Evidence gathered from coal balls assists paleobotanists and systematic botanists as they explore relationships among extinct and modern plants. Joy, Willis, and Lacey (1956) published a simple method of obtaining peel from coal balls. Their acetate peel method is shown below in five steps.
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FIGURE 8.2
Acetate peel of a coal ball.
no sparks! While acetone is still standing on the surface, slowly roll the acetate film onto the coal ball. 4. Allow the acetate film to dry for at least 20 minutes. A peel may be left in place overnight or longer without harm. When dry, carefully peel the acetate film away, and trim the rough or uneven edges. Store the peels in envelopes or paper clipped to an index card. Examine the peels under a dissecting microscope. Figure 8.2 shows an example of a peel. Figure 8.3 identifies several of the major plant components of the coal ball in Figure 8.2. 5. For each successive peel, it is necessary to obtain a fresh surface by grinding a new surface as in step 1. As only a small amount of material is removed with each successive peel, it is possible to use each coal ball repeatedly. Thus, a single coal ball slice can remain in an interest center over a long period of time, or a classroom set of several coal balls can serve a whole class, taking turns throughout the week.
FIGURE 8.3
Identities of the major plant components of the peel in Figure 8.2.
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Sources of Materials:
Plant Fossil Microscope Kit (Kit containing fragment of a coal ball plus materials for making 12 acetate peels). Available from: Carolina Biological Supply Company Burlington, NC 27215. Tel 919-584-0381 or 800-334-5551.
Cellulose Acetate Film, 003 thickness. Available in rolls from: Dick Blick P.O. Box 1267 Galesburg, IL 61401 Tel 309-343-5785 or 800-373-7575. Coal Balls: Coal balls can be picked up at many strip-mining sites in the United States. They are also available from: Wards Natural History Science Establishment 5100 West Henrietta Road Rochester, N.Y. 14691-9012. Tel 716-359-2502 or 800-962-2660.
References:
Joy, K. W., A. J. Willis, and W. S. Lacey. 1956. A rapid cellulose peel technique in paleobotany. Annals of Botany 20 (80): 635637. Ma, P. R. 1992. Thin peels of ancient plants. Presentation at Annual convention of National Science Teachers Association, Boston. Philips, W. N., M. J. Avcin, and D. Berggren. 1976. Fossil peat from the Illinois basin: A guide to the study of coal balls of Pennsylvanian age. Illinois State Geological Survey Series 11.
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Suggested criteria:
The sculpture should be dinosaur inspired. You may select a wooded area, an open area, or a combination of the two. The size should be less than 50 feet square and less than 65 feet high. The sculpture can be real or abstract. It can be fashioned of any material: wood, stone, concrete, metal, or clay. It can depict a part of a dinosaur, one individual, a population, or a community. It should convey information, emotion, or beauty to the viewer. That message should be unforgettablestay with the viewer forever. It could affect awe, humor, pity that they are no longer alive, or relief that they are extinct. You do not need to have artistic technical skills, but you do need to be inspired. Be original. Title your sculpture.
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FIGURE 9.1
Example of the reconstruction of a dinosaur in its natural habitat.
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FIGURE 9.2
Glossopteris ferns from the Carboniferous Period.
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FIGURE 9.3
Trilobite from Cincinnati, Ohio.
These pages show some photographs of fossils that have artistic elements. Figure 9.2 is a split rock in black and white of fossil Glossopteris ferns from the Carboniferous Period 360 to 290 mya. The two split rocks open the sandwich of white fossil enabling one to see the part and counterpart images of the fossil leaves. Its like looking at both the finger and the fingerprint of the fossil. About 500 million years ago, on the floor of a muddy sea near present-day Cincinnati, Ohio, trilobites skittered around on the impressionable mud. Their tracks hardened in the mud, were buried for half a billion years, and in the 20th century appeared at the surface of a streambed (Figure 9.3). Black dense rock shaped by tumbling water and gradually filled with now white coral (Figure 9.4). Its very heavy. Thats about all we know about it. We put it on a table and people ask two kinds of questions: What is it? How did it form?
FIGURE 9.4
Fossil coral in black rock.
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FIGURE 9.5
Agatized leg bone from the Cretaceous of Patagonia.
A cross section of a leg bone that fossilized during the Cretaceous Period in Patagonia, Argentina (Figure 9.5). The densest portion of the outer surface of the bone was replaced by a white form of agate, the less dense bone was infiltrated by red agate (red jasper), and the open space in the center of the bone was filled with colorless quartz. The impregnation of white, red and clear quartz is a natural coincidence for the colors of the tissues. The ammonites (such as those in Figure 9.6) were the most symmetrical and colorful animals that lived in seas during the Mesozoic Era. Like the dinosaurs and the pterosaurs, the ammonites became extinct some 65 million years ago. What could have happened to these fashionable jewels of the sea?
FIGURE 9.6
Cut and polished ammonites.
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Age of the Earth. Meteorites are remnants of the original material of the solar system and have an age of approximately 4,600,000,000 years. Age of Reptiles. The four geological periods, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous (28065 million years ago), during which reptiles were the dominant animal on land and in the surface water of the sea. Recently, the subclass of Archosauria (the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, crocodiles, and birds) has been raised to a Class separate from reptiles. Amber. A fossil resin secreted by healthy tropical flowering and conifer trees in response to wounds inflicted by boring insects or mechanical injuries. Archosauria. A proposed class of vertebrates containing the dinosaurs, the crocodilians and birds, and certain extinct forms. Archaeopteryx. The earliest bird found in Jurassic rock in Germany. So far there are ten specimens with half dinosaur and half bird characteristics. Aves. Formerly the class name for birds, which now appear to be dinosaurs specialized for flight. Biped. Two footed as Homo sapiens, birds, and some dinosaurs. Carbonization. A fossil that has been reduced to a carbon scale, as a leaf that has been preserved as carbon. Cast. A fossil that forms as minerals in a space previously occupied by a living specimen. Cenozoic Era. The current time zone dating back to 65 million years known as the Age of Mammals. Cladistics. The goal of cladistics is to place organisms in a sequence of space that corresponds to the tree of life. To accomplish this each species is selected on the basis of the simplest distribution of derived characteristics to approximate the historical branching of the tree of life. Coal balls. When coal forms some of the material becomes saturated with calcium carbonate and forms into round concretions of rock and fossil material. Discarded by the mining industry, the concretions are valuable fossils representing 250350 million year old forest plant life with preserved cell structures. Continental drift. The theory that land masses move across the face of the Earth on mobile crustal plates.
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Copal. Amber that has not yet been hardened by seawater. Can be detected by jabbing it with a hot needle. Crater. A scar made by a body colliding with Earth, sometimes miles or millimeters in diameter. Cretaceous Period. The latest period of the Mesozoic Era, 14465 million years ago. Dinosauria. A subclass of the Archosauria comprising the Orinothischia and Saurischia. Dinosaur Art. An object depicting an aspect of dinosaur life that evokes an emotional response. Displacement. When a model dinosaur is immersed in water it takes the place of an equal volume of water. If the volume of displaced water is measured it is equal to the volume of the model. Diversity. Given the population of a community, the numbers of species that make up the total population of that community constitutes its diversity. Ectothermic. Cold-blooded, having a variable internal temperature, dependent on external conditions. Egg nests. The nest sites of communal dinosaurs are found in large groups and may have been protected from predators on islands. The nest sites give evidence that the dinosaurs provided care for the young. Eighteen-inch layer. In the Green River Formation of Wyoming there is a layer of fossiliferous rock that is 18 inches thick and that has a superabundance of fish fossils of all sizes and species. It is thought that at this time there was a series of significant fish kills. Endothermic. Warm-blooded, having a constant internal temperature independent of external conditions. Evolution. A change in the genetic characteristics of a population of organisms over a series of generations brought about through natural selection. Extinction. The death of an entire species. Fossil. Traces of organisms in rocks preserved by geological processes. Fossil fuels. An energy source of heat that was captured by the sun in plants. Includes the solid coal preserved in swamps, the liquid oil from plants and animals preserved mostly deep in the ground, and the natural gas preserved in porous rock in the ground.
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Fossil works of art. Fossils that have the special quality to evoke emotions in the viewer. Forests of coal swamps. The swamp trees and other vegetation that form the forest plant community during the Carboniferous Period and contributed coal. Geological time scale. Whereas we use a clock and calendar to track events in our daily lives, the geologist uses a time span of the age of Earth, 4,600,000,000 million years, to track the events of the Earth. The scale is divided into Eras (e.g. Mesozoic) and Periods (e.g. Cretaceous) and Epochs (e.g. Miocene) and finally Ages (e.g. Maastrichtian). Homology. The fundamental similarity based on common descent. The vertebrate humerus, for example, is present, or was present in the embryo, in all vertebrate animals from amphibians to humans. Joules. The Standard International unit of energy equal to the energy done by a force of one newton when its point of application moves a distance of one meter in the direction of the force. It is equivalent to 10 erg or one watt-second. Jurassic Period. The middle Period of the Mesozoic Era, 208144 million years ago. Linnean System of Classification. A classification in which all species of organisms are grouped in nested boxes from species, genus, family, order, class, phylum and kingdom based on overall similarity. The thought was that this grouping would reflect the sequence of evolution of life. Mammals. Hairy animals that suckle their young. They emerged late in the Permian Period, but were suppressed by the archosaurs throughout the Mesozoic Era, and emerged as the dominant land animal during the Cenozoic Era. Mass extinction. The death of large numbers of species due sudden changes in the environment. Mesozoic Era. The age of archosaurs from 24565 million years ago. Microfossil. A fossil so small that it can be only identified and studied with a microscope. Micrometeorites. Dust-like meteorites that enter the Earth atmosphere continually as shooting stars, they may be shaped like microscopic spheres or small irregular solids. Mold. The imprint of something like teeth bitten in a block of clay. Filling the mold with plaster of paris would produce a cast. Paleobiogeography. The study of the distribution of ancient plants and animals and their relationship to ancient geographical features.
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Permian Period. The last time period of Paleozoic Era (286245 million year ago) characterized by dry land and the early domination of reptiles followed by the emergence of mammals. Permineralization. Pores of the skeleton of the organism, such as bone or wood, are filled with minerals. Most petrified wood is preserved in this manner. Phytoplankton. Microscopic plants floating at the surface of bodies of water throughout the world. Responsible for photosynthesis, which fuels the aquatic system. Pterosaur. One of the flying archosaurs whose wings were composed of leather airfoils supported on a single little elongated finger. Quadruped. Four-footed as horse, salamander, and some dinosaurs. Radiation. A process in which the descendants of a successful species diversify in function and form to occupy more than one niche. Replacement. The process of a molecule-for-molecule exchange of one substance for another. For example, the shell of a mollusk might be replaced by pyrite. Reptiles. A class of terrestrial vertebrates including lizards, snakes, turtles, and their extinct relatives. Reptiles are ectotherms with three chambered hearts. They were ancestral to mammals and archosaurs. Sedimentary rock. Mineral or organic matter deposited by air, water, or ice and forming a layered deposit. Scientific theory. A well-established science explanation for natural phenomena that has been tested many times and not been proven wrong. Species. The major subdivision of a genus regarded as the basic category of biological classification, composed of related individuals that resemble each other and are not able to breed with other species. Strata. Layers in sedimentary rock or anything else. Taphonomy. The circumstances and processes of fossilization. Taxonomy. The science dealing with the description, identification, naming, and classification of organisms. Trace fossil. A fossilized track, boring, burrow, trail, or other structure in sedimentary rock that records the organism or behavior of the organism that made it.
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Triassic Period. The first period of the Mesozoic Era, 245208 million years ago. Ultrasaurus macIntosh. The largest dinosaur fossil discovered. It was found in Jurassic rock in Colorado, and is believed to have weighed an estimated 150 tons. Vertebrate. Animal with backbone, e.g., fish, amphibians, reptiles, archosaurs, mammals, and birds.
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A
acetate peel method for coal balls, 108109 Agathis, 10, 11 agatized bone, 4, 116, 116f agatized wood, 4 airborne vertebrates, 23. See also birds; pterosaurs Albertosaurus characteristics, 81, 82 cladogram, 82f allosaurs, tracks of, 25f Allosaurus characteristics, 81, 82 cladogram, 82f amber, 911 insect trapped in sap, 10f polishing, 9 ammonites, 5 as art, 116, 116f Andrew, Roy Chapman, 86 ankylosaurs, 91 tracks, 25f Antarctic Circle, dinosaurs in, 98 antelopes hind limbs, 34f skeleton, 34f anthracite coal, 107 Anurognathus, 23 Archaeopteryx, 7476, 85 forelimbs, 77f restoration, 76f skeleton, 74f archosaurs. See also crocodiles; dinosaurs; pterosaurs age of, 9093 relative proportion through time, 91f terrestrial ecological niches of, 90f Argentina, dinosaurs in, 96 armadillo defensive armor, 42f hind limbs, 34f art dinosaur art contest, 112113
fossils as, 114116 asteroids, 49 and species extinctions, 51 energy released by, 57 modeling impact of, 51 astronomy, activities covering, viit Australia, dinosaurs in, 98
B
background extinctions, 50 Baltic coast amber, 10, 11 bat, skeleton of, 19f binomial system of nomenclature, 81 biology, activities covering, viit bipeds, tracks of, 24 birds, 91 evolution of dinosaurs to, 75f features shared with nonavian dinosaurs, 73, 7476 bituminous coal, 107 block model of Earth history, 70, 72f body fossils, 1 bolides, 49 bones of arms and legs, 3335, 78 Brachiosauridae, 84 Brachiosaurus height compared to human, 79f largest assembled, 95 reconstruction, 95f skeleton, 94f weight, 31, 32, 80 British Museum, 31, 32 C California Polytechnic State University, 9 Camarasaurus skeleton, 35f Canada, dinosaurs in, 96, 98 Cano, Ral, 9 Carboniferous period, 107, 108 carbonization, 1 Carnegie Institute, 31, 32 Carnosauria, 91 carnosaurs, tracks, 24f
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carpals, 33, 78 casts fossil formation by, 1 making, 23, 63f cat, 42f Cenozoic Era, dominant fauna during, 9192 Ceratopsia, 91 rate of evolution, 8687 Ceratopsid reconstruction, 86f chemistry, activities covering, viit chicken, 74f embryo, 78f, 7980 China, dinosaurs in, 96 cladistics, method of, 73, 8185 classification, 89103 coal, 106107 coal balls ancient plants in peels of, 108110 peel, 109f Coelurosuaria, 91 coke, 107 collecting microfossils, 67 micrometeorites, 53 comets, 49 Compsognathidae, 84 Compsognathus, 7476, 85 restoration, 76f skeleton, 74f copal, 10 coyotes hind limbs, 34f skeleton, 34f Cretaceous Period, dominant fauna during, 90 crocodiles, 91 evolution rate, 87 forelimbs, 77f hind limbs, 33f crow, forelimbs of, 77f
Deinonychosauria, 84 Deinonychus characteristics, 81, 82 cladogram, 82f forelimbs, 79f, 80 density of animals, 31 diatoms, 65, 65f dinosaur art contest, 112, 113f dinosaurs, 91 adaptation, 96 cladogram of major groups, 84f eggs, 37, 39 evolution, 7387 extinction, 50, 96 names, 93 nesting sites, 3639, 37f, 86 size, 26, 79f, 80, 9495 speed, 33 taxonomic hierarchy, 92t tracking, 2430 weight, 3132, 31f worldwide distribution, 9698, 97t Diplodocidae, 84 Diplodocus footprints, 30f weight, 32 diversity, 89103 differing proportions and, 101102 measuring, 99103 sample size and, 99100 DNA, 9 Dominican Republic amber, 10, 11 duckbill dinosaurs, 28 crests, 78f
E
Earth and space science, activities aligned with, ixt Earth, age of, 6972 great moments in history, 71t illustrating, 70, 72f Earth, cratering by meteor impact, 54f, 55, 57t ecology, activities covering, viit
D
dead organisms, changes in body of, 8 defensive armors, 42f, 44
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elephants skeleton, 34f thermoregulation, 43, 44f embryos, 78f and evolutionary history of vertebrates, 7980 energy of a moving object, calculating, 54 England, dinosaurs in, 96 environmental health, species diversity as measure of, 103 eons, 50 eras, 50 Eryops, forelimbs of, 77f Eusuchia, 91 evolution activities covering, viit from dinosaurs to birds, 75f of dinosaurs, 7387 of vertebrates, 78 rates of, 8687 extinctions of species, 4952, 96
fossil replicas, making, 6364 fossilized wood, 5 fossils collection and preparation, 5967 definition, 1 first, 71t fish, 6062 formation, 111 fuels, 105107 in amber, 911 inferences based on, 17 learning from, 1347 making replicas, 6364 of dinosaurs eggs, 39 of grapes and bananas, 8 foundational sciences, paleontology and, vii, viiit
G
geological time scale, 50f geology, activities covering, viit global cooling and extinctions, 51 global warming and extinctions, 51 glossary, 117121 Glossopteris ferns fossil, 114f, 115 Goldfuss, Georg August, 14, 20 gums, resins distinguished from, 10
F
femur, 33 fibula, 33 fireballs, 49 footprints, 30f making a mold of, 64 Tyrannosaurus rex, 26, 26f foraminifera (forams), 66, 66f, 67, 67f forelimbs of vertebrates, 77f, 79f dinosaur specialization, 80 of Ultrasaurus, 94f fossil art, 114116, 114f, 115f Fossil Butte National Monument (Kemmerer, Wyoming), 60 fossil coral, 115f fossil fish, displaying, 62f fossil fish, preparing, 6062 materials needed, 61f removal of limestone slabs, 60f uncovering fossil, 61f fossil fuels, 105107
H
Hadrosauria, 91 hadrosaurs footprint, 30f tracks, 24f, 25f, 27f, 29f walk of, 28f hands, inferring peoples characteristics from, 17, 18f Hennig, Willi, 81 hind limbs of vertebrates, 34f and speed of animals, 34 positions of, 33f history and nature of science, activities aligned with, ixt homology, 73, 7780
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horse, skeleton, 34f human embryo, 78f, 7980 height compared to Brachiosaurus, 79f leg bones, 33f tracks, 24f, 27f Humboldt Museum (Germany), 95 humerus, 33, 78 Hymenaea, 10 hypothesis forming, 13, 4243 testing, 13, 4346
I
inferring characteristics from partial information, 1719 Island Dwarfism, 98
J
Jensen, James, 94, 95 Joy, K. W., 108 Jurassic Park, 9 Jurassic Period, dominant fauna during, 90
authenticated craters, 57t collision with Earth, 4957 crater in Arizona, 54f energy of incoming, 54 entering Earths atmosphere, 49f impact craters, modeling, 5556, 55f methane, 106107 Mexico amber, 10 microfossils, 6567 micrometeorites, 53, 53f molds fossil formation by, 1 making, 23, 63f, 64f mollusks fossils, 5 microfossils, 65, 6667, 67f Mongolia, dinosaurs in, 96 moon snails, 40, 40f Muricidae, 40f, 41 Mussasaurus, skeleton, 80f
N
National Science Education Standards alignment of activities with, ixt paleontology and, ixt, vii natural gas, 106107
L
Lacey, W. S., 108 lagoon environment reconstruction, 20f language and art, activities covering, viit Leaellynasaur, 98 life cycles, 8 life science, activities aligned with, ixt lignite, 107 Linn, Carl von, 81
O
Ornithischia, 84, 91 Ornithopoda, 91 ornithopods, 28 ostracods, 65, 66, 66f, 67f
M
mammals. See therapsids mass extinctions, 50 mathematics, activities covering, viit Mesosuchia, 91 metacarpals, 33, 78 Metasequoia glyptostroboides, 11 metatarsals, 33 meteors, 49
P
paleobiogeography, 96 peacock, 43, 43f peat, 107 periods, 50 Permian Period, reptiles in, 90 permineralization, 1 simulating, 1, 4 petrified wood, 4 petroleum, 106107
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phalanges, 78 physical science, activities aligned with, ixt physics, activities covering, viit phytoplankton, 65 porcupine, 42f predation, 4041 Protoceratops, 86 reconstruction, 86f Protosuchia, 91 pseudomorph, 39 Psittacosaurus, 86 reconstruction, 86f Pterodactyloidea, 91 Pterosauria, 91 pterosaurs, 23 forelimbs, 77f puffer fish, 43, 43f
Q
quadrupeds, tracks of, 24 Quetzalcoatlus, 23
R
radius, 33, 78 replacement, 1 molecule-for-molecule replacement of fossils, 5, 5f reptiles age of, 9093 diversification, 91 evolution rate of contemporary, 8687 posture, 33 relative proportion through time, 91f resins, 910 Rhamphorynchoidea, 91 Romania, dinosaurs in, 98
S
sample size effect on measure of diversity, 99100 sap, resins distinguished from, 10 Sauripterus, forelimbs of, 77f Saurischia, 84, 91
Sauropoda, 91 adaptations of, 96, 98 sauropods, 84, 95 footprints, 30f tracks, 25, 25f, 29f Scaphognathus crassirostris fossil drawn by Goldfuss, 22f reconstruction of, 1415, 15f, 2022 restoration of, 1415, 16f, 23 specimen found by Goldfuss, 20f Scaphognathus purdoni, 23 scapula, 78 science and technology, activities aligned with, ixt science as inquiry, activities aligned with, ixt science in personal and social perspectives, activities aligned with, ixt scientific hypotheses, 13 scientific inquiry, 1314 scientific law, 1314 scientific method as distinguished from scientific inquiry, 13 scientific theory, 13 Scilinks age of the Earth, 69 classification, 89 dinosaur extinction, 49 dinosaurs, 111 dinosaurs, comparing, 94 evolution and adaptation, 87 evolution in the science classroom, 74 fossil fuels, 105 fossil record, 73 fossils, 1 meteors, 54 population, 17 scientific inquiry, 13 sedimentary rock, 6 systems of classification, 81 taxonomy, 90 using models, 32 vertebrate evolution, 77 sea level changes and extinctions, 5152
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I N D E X
seashells, predation and, 4041 sedimentary rock, fossils in, 67, 7f sedimentary rock, simulation of, 67 Seismosaurus, weight of, 32 Seymouria, forelimbs of, 77f Shannon-Weaver diversity index, 102, 103 shell clipping crab, 41f shooting stars. See meteors size of dinosaurs Brachiosaurus, 79f estimation on basis of tracks, 26 Ultrasaurus macIntoch, 9495 variations, 80 space rocks, 49 species average geological life span of, 49 number of in history of earth, 36 species richness, 99 speed hind limbs and, 34 of common animals, 35f of dinosaurs, 33 tracks and, 27 Stegosauria, 91 Stegosaurus plates on the back of, 16, 4147, 45f skeleton, 35f, 45f string model of Earth history, 70 Struthiomimus forelimbs, 79f, 80 skeleton, 35f Supersaurus, 94 weight, 32
thermoregulation, 43 of elephants, 43, 44f Theropoda, 84 Third International Mathematics and Science Study, vii tibia, 33 Titanosauria, 84 trace fossils, 1 tracks and size estimation, 26 and speed, 27 as evidence of behavior, 24 making a mold of, 64, 64f Triassic Period, dominant fauna during, 90, 96 Triceratops, 8687 forelimbs, 79f, 80 trilobites, 115, 115f turtles, 42f evolution rate, 87 Tyrannosaurus characteristics, 81, 82 cladogram, 82f weight, 31 Tyrannosaurus rex footprint, 26, 26f forelimbs, 79f, 80 skeleton, 26f
U
U.S. energy flow (2001), 106f ulna, 78 Ultrasauros, weight of, 32 Ultrasaurus macIntoch, 9495 forelimb, 94f United States dinosaurs in, 96, 98 energy flow in 2001, 106f
T
taphonomy, 3637 tarsals, 33 taxonomy, 89103 teachers notes, 1, 1415, 52, 69 teeth, making a mold and cast of, 1, 3, 3f therapsids age of, 9093 relative proportion through time, 91f
V
vertebrates. See forelimbs of vertebrates; hind limbs of vertebrates cladogram of four-limbed, 83 embryos, 78f, 7980
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I N D E X
W
whelk, 41f Willis, A. J., 108 wood fossils, 4, 5
Z
zooplankton, 65
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