Missing You

Last summer, I did some surveying with a woman named Steph. Besides finding fossils, Steph was focused on getting as much area done as possible. She surveyed very, very fast, so that I was sure that she couldn't possibly have been getting everything. I brought this to the attention of our supervisor and was told that she didn't think that Steph was going too fast. Having been either chewed out or brushed off when ever I brought it up, I just dropped the subject. As a consiquence though, in an area that we nick-named Valley of the Birds, we apparently missed what is possibly the most significant bonebed ever found in this particular formation. The way that it was found was that last week my supervisor and the lead paleontologist for the company were out mapping the geology of the area on their own time and litterally stumbled upon it. It's bee described to me as so obvious and extensive that there is no way that we could have missed it if we had actually looked at those rocks. As a result, I feel bad for having let myself be pressured into going faster than I thouht was adequate for the survey and my supervisor feels bad for having not taken my complaints seriously. We're now planning on going back and resurveying areas that were previously done by only Steph and I so that we can correct for her influence over the results.

The Library of Stuff

In effect, the Salvation Army, Good Will and other Thrift stores that rely on donations are libraries of stuff.  You check something out, you pay a fee, and then when you are done with it, you return it to the library that you got it from or another branch.   If you deem that something is beyond saving, you forfeit your fee and you save the library from throwing it away for you.  

  I think that if someone where to take this idea to the next logical step and make a business that was actually a library of things other than media, eg. clothing, furniture, tools, appliances, all things donated by the community of potential and actual users, then it would be a rather successful business.  Internet sites already serve to link individuals with stuff that they are getting rid of with those that would like to acquire it.  The problem with those is that there are not necessarily items that you want available when you want them, and that there is the issue of shipping, which is expensive.  Furthermore, if one only desires an item temporarily, then that person has to go through the same hassle of getting rid of it or storing it that the first person did.  If there was just a central location that you could go to to inexpensively get second hand items for a limited time, or that one could dump such items at, it would be a great convenience.  Really the only difference between this model and a regular thrift store is that one would actually be expected to return the item and that the store would actually keep real track of inventory.

Just imagine: a guy needs a suite or a big meeting but forgot to pack it while traveling.  No problem, he just goes to the stuff library!  A student needs a dresser or a desk.  No problem, the stuff library has a glut of desks that outgoing students have dropped off.  Have a couch but don't want to move it to your new home in another state?  That's all right, just drop it off and we'll give you a coupon for a couch where you're going!  So long as people aren't emotionally attached to the items, the stuff library is doing great!

As if anyone still reads this

I got my official letter of acceptance into a Masters Program today.  It's at the Quaternary Science department at Northern Arizona University, which is good since it's the only school that I applied to this year.  

In past years, I followed my Mom's advise and applied to as many schools as possible.  In past years, I was summarily rejected by every school that I applied to.  Evidently, I put my eggs in too many baskets in the past.  

I don't know yet if I'll be going to NAU.  There are other extraneous factors that I'm not at liberty to publicly discuss at present, but things are really looking up for me.  Going to grad school is the fruition of my entire life's work so far.  I'll grant that any progress towards pre-eminent vertebrate paleontologist is the fruition of my life's work so far, but this is a very big step.  I'll admit though that receiving the letter didn't cause any real reaction.  I already knew it was coming.  My prospective advisor wants me to work with him and I have funding lined up, I've been notified several times before that I'm getting in.  Receiving this letter just makes it official.  The irony is that I won't be able to respond to the letter until the extraneous factors are resolved.  C'est la vie.  Life is a waiting game.

The Moor Things Change, The More They Stay the Same

Once again, I'm at the Tucson Mineral and Fossil Show.  I consider these trips to be valuable educational opportunities.  For instance, I'm learning how much the value of the U.S. dollar has dropped in the last few years compared for foreign currencies.  Since Morocco is one of the biggest exporters of fossils today, they are possibly the best yardstick to judge the value of the dollar in terms of the actual quality of a specimen.  In particular, I've been looking at a Tethysaur partial skeleton with an attached limb.  This is very rare.  Two years ago, I saw a similar specimen without a limb for about 2.5 grand.  This year, the one that I'm looking at is over 4 grand.  

Another valuable thing that I've learned is that vertebrate fossils are essentially smuggled out of Morocco.  Apparently nobody ever declares what is in the actual box when they ship something out of the country.  they put some polished pieces of marble on top, say that the whole box is full of the same and easily get incredibly valuable fossils past customs.   I'm not quite sure how I feel about this in terms of the balance between respect for another country's attempt to keep its historical resources within its border and the respect for the fact that there would be no way for Morocco to protect or house the fossils even if they stayed there.  After learning this, I've held off on buying any more Moroccan material.  This will likely be a short lived moratorium as I plan on buying that Tethysaur tomorrow morning as soon as I hear whether or not I qualify for the company $1000 publication bonus.   A museum that is interested might be able to swing another grand to chip in and the tax refund on donating it is worth about another thousand.  Well, lets see how things work out. 

Trouble Avoided

My van has a really bad problem of breaking down when I'm far from home.  For once at least, I've managed to avoid that by breaking down only 15 miles from the house.  When I've joked that the exterior of the van is the only thing that is old, that all of the internal working parts are practically brand new, apparently I forgot about the ignition system.  The starter is new, but the actual ignition is now 13 years old.  The problem that I had today was that the key has stopped turning all the way to the start position, thereby keeping me from starting the van.   The radio will turn on, but the engine is beyond my reach.  After jiggling the key and turning it with varying forces, I did manage to get the engine started and get back home.  

The irony here (beyond the fact that I only got it started within the gaze of the tow truck driver) is that I had originally planned to be in Quartzite, AZ today, at the main event rock show.  If the key had stopped working when I was camping out there, then the only directions that I would have been able to give a tow truck would have been GPS coordinates.  Thankfully, my parents had some urgent work that they were told would be coming in today and they told me that they needed me to stick around to do it.  The work did not come in after all, but even if it does come in tomorrow, I won't be able to do it, unless I somehow get my ignition system fixed by 10am.  Oh well, Gelnaw's law may not be universal, but it affects my life at every turn.

Resolve

New Year, Same Resolutions.

This time I mean it though.  There shouldn't be a difference between a resolution and a goal that you actually have the determination to accomplish, but there is.  Here are the things that I actually have the determination to achieve this year:

1.  Get into a relationship that lasts more than a month. 

2.  Start my thesis, whether I'm in grad school or not.

3.  Clean my room and keep it clean ( I actually mean it this year!)

4.  read all of the books that I was given last year.  This is a bigger and bigger accomplishment every year.  I've so far never achieved it.

Adieu till Spring

I've left the frigid conditions of the Uinta Basin for a while. I'll likely go back when the snow melts in the spring. In the mean time though, I'm told that SWCA has some work for me here in So Cal, and I plan on contacting all the other environmental consulting companies in the area with the purpose of whoring out my paleontological services to whoever has work for me.

Moustache Champion

Working Conditions

Well, it would seem that my amusingly elaborate mustache has a new function. It now acts as a place for ice to condense while I'm working. Yeah, it's cold. Yes, I'm out there all day. Does it warm up in the afternoon? Not really.

Stark Contrast

They say that mutability is the only constant. The weather in Utah is highly mutable. During the summer, it wasn't uncommon to get back to the truck after a long day of hiking to find that the thermometer read over 110F. Today, the thermometer barely got above 25F. In spite of the dramatic difference, the two temperatures do share the fact that they make working a full day outside somewhat uncomfortable. Those of you in Canada, where the temperature has been below freezing since well before your thanksgiving, please hold of on your scoffing. I happen to know that very few of you do field work up there this time of year. The most time that you really need to spend out side is the time it takes to get from one building to the other or to the bus. Eight hours outside has a bit more demanding toll on the body, even at near freezing temperatures.
In other news, in stark contrast to what I've been saying about being here until it snows, I'll be staying here a little longer apparently. I can't do paleo surveys with even an inch of powder on the grownd, but I can certainly monitor well pad construction. The oil companies finally got permission to build well pads and by damn if they're going to let a little snow and short daylight hours stop them from doing it! It would seem that this is what I'll be doing for the next little while, which suits me, as there isn't much work for me right now in CA except process serving. Not working for my parents makes the bitter cold, just a little more bearable.

Quality Time

The 10 States (in Order traveled through): Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas & Colorado

The Beautiful Women (in no particular order): Spark of Life, Many of the women at SVP (names too numerous to list indivudually) and a few girls that I met on 6th st in Austin (names forgotten or never learned). I would like to state for the record, and to protect those mentioned above from scandle, that I was a near perfect gentleman.

The Friends: Otra, Sudeep, TJ, Becky, Darek & Margret (you're married, you count as one friend), Spark of Life, Team Canada at SVP (includes the above mentioned women)

The Walking Dead: While in California, I read World War Z, an oral history of the zombie war. It was a good book and an interesting, and very practical take on the zombie genre including stories illustrating facets of a global war on the undead that aren't usually highlighted in the movies, such as the need to maintain global communications satelites, flow of refugees, conflict between nuclear powers, what people do for food when they flee north, propaganda films, etc. Like many of the books that I've read lately, it isn't great literature, but it is entertaining.

Rollin'

20 days, 10 states, over 4,000 miles traveled, beautiful women, good friends, a fair amount of booze and the walking dead. It was a good vacation.

Let the Sun Shine

The sun shines differently in southern California. There is a unique combination of altitude, pollution and humidity in this land of eternal summer that makes this place feel like home to me no matter how long I've been away. The moment that I enter the Los Angeles Basin, I feel like I'm right where I belong. Furthermore, although other people who move here after living in more northern clines say that they miss the changing of the seasons, I don't. The only season that I ever miss is summer, and that only happens when I'm away. It's good to be back, if only for a little while.

Photo Update

As promised, I'm posting some of the photos from this summer

I am in a very intersting part of the world. There is no doubt that the people of this are aware of the importance of the local national monument and the paleontology of the area. In many ways, it is like Drumheller, except that the beer has less than half the alcohol. At the same time, the curche is the center of the comunity, literally. The streets around here are actually numbered with the Mormon temple at the dead center.

In the flat areas of our survey, we found many horned lizards of different sizes, but adult and extremely small seemed to dominate. The little guy shown here is not nearly the smallest lizard that I saw. That title would go to a lizard so small that I have no idea what kind it was. It likely could have still been curled into the size of its egg.

This fellow however took the title for most colorful lizard found. I found it in an area of badlands south of Douglas Pass in Colorado

Speaking of Douglas Pass, this is the view to the south from that vantage point

While camping up at Douglas Pass, it had become apparent that I had no conventional can opener handy. Therefore, it fell to my most versitile of tools to do the job. A rock hammer doesn't open a can cleanly, but the can is definately open.

Working in the field kills boots. More precisely it eats them. It chews them up, swallows and later craps out something no longer recognisable as functional footwear. This photo was taken within two weeks of my arival here in Vernal. The wire that you see is all that really held the booth together enough for the photo. Needless to say, I replaced my boots that night at the only shoe store that was still open when I got back into town. Consiquently, I purchased a pair of Redwings for over $80.00, making them the most expensive shoes I've ever owned. In the two and a half months since then, my new boots have been chewed up as well. The leather is worn out, the seems are bursting and the tread is completely gone.

Long Overdue Update

I'm waiting for my supervisor to finish some office stuff before we go out into the field to extract a large (possibly) brontothere jaw from an extremely large block of sandstone, so I thought that I should take this opportunity to post a long overdue update on what has been going on.

I've been in Vernal, Utah since mid July and will likely be out here until the stat of October, when everyone else takes off and makes it impossible for me to continue working. What I've been doing is what we lovingly call "catch and release paleontology." That is, I'm doing surveys of a very large area on the Ute Tribe Indian Reservation so that when oil wells are put there in the next couple of years, they will know what spots to avoid so as to minimize the impact on this valuable scientific and cultural resource. The bad thing is, and this is the release portion of the name, although we are finding vast quantities of extremely scientifically valuable fossils, that would probably close to double the total collections of fossils from this time period, we are prohibited by the tribe from actually collecting anything on their land. We are allowed to collect fossils from BLM land (hense why I'll be heading out in a few minutes) but our survey of BLM land is restricted to areas where they have already decided to put an oil well. The opinion of the Ute tribe appears to be that they want the fossils saved from destruction by drilling equipment and bulldozers, so that they can be destroyed by the ravages of natural erosion instead.

The most common thing that we find on the reservation is fragmentary turtle remains. There are three or four distinct kinds of turtles here, but only one is readily distinguishable by the texture of its shell. Typically, the turtles are broken by erosion into such small pieces that the texture of the shell is the only thing that we can go by. Other than turtles, we are also finding crocodiles, alligators, tapirs, rhinos, primitive horses, primitive artiodactyls called protoreodonts and leptoreodonts, camels, brontotheres (looks like a rhino but only distantly related) and a variety of microfossils. Most of the animals we find are only fragmentary remains, with jaws and teeth being the most commonly preserved part of a mammal. This is not to say that other parts are not sometimes found as well. In fact, on my first day out in the field, I found the skull of a rhino practically sticking out the side of a cliff.

The number of co-workers that I have has varied widely since I got here as different people arrive and leave as their schedules allow. With two exceptions though, they've all been (at least) moderately attractive young women. The face of paleontology is certainly changing.

Beyond work thought, there hasn't been much going on for me. My Birthday was last month and my parents ordered some really interesting books (Cope's Bible and Este's Phylogeny of the Lizards if you're interested in knowing) and my grandparents sent me checks cumulatively large enough that I can get an air scribe and a stereomicroscope. Tremendous thanks to them if they are reading this! I've also gotten to do some fossil hunting on my own including going out near Bonanza and digging in the Parachute Creek member of the Green River formation. Things that I found there include a large number of fossilized beetles, flies, mosquitos, weavles, leaves and even a small number of exquisite flowers. I also got to go over the mountains to the Bridger Basin (a historically famous area for eocene mammals: Cope and Marsh faught bitterly over naming creatures from that area). The purpose of my brief visit there was to help SWCA's lead paleontologist, Paul Murphy, look for fossils from the upper most Bridger formation, which is also the least fossiliferous, in order to find support for the hypothesis that the upper Bridger is the same age as the Uinta Formation.
I also had a brief and somewhat dissappointing trip to Denver for the Mineral and Fossil show that was out there, but Peter Larson of the Black Hills institute once again beat me to the interesting lizard fossils. I'm fairly confident that he got a new species of mosasaur from Morocco, since it had teeth that were intermediate in form between globidens and a more classic mosasaur dentition.
That pretty much brings everyone up to date. I will have pictures of events so far in an upcoming post and I intend to start posting more regularly.

B-Day

It's my birthday and I've a fair number of thank you cards to write, but I'm exhausted. Working a 12 hour day, 9 of which is vigerous exersize, is great for the pay check, but it leaves you wiped out.

The Conservative View of Paleontology

Aparently, Fox News, the product of conservative billionaire Rupert Murdock's personal love affair with media filters, has an evolution and paleontology web page. Even more amazing, the page includes statements indicating that the eart is over 6,000 years old and that perhaps not all creatures were created at the same time. At the same time though, there is a story on its front page about how well the creation museum in Kentucky is doing, and all of the stories have headlines that would make any thinking follower of evolution and paleontology news cringe. For example "Living fossil not so primitive after all!" This was in reference to a study published about the whether the symetrical fin of the coelocanth is the primitive condition or one derived after its lineage branched off from our own. A discovery of one of the oldest coelocanth fossils shows that it is in fact the derived condition. Not so primitive huh? Beyond the fact that primitive is a relative term, it doesnt change the fact that the coelocanth has remained relatively unchanged in close to 390 million years. Also, one would expect some evolution in that time. Furthermore, the use of the coelocanth limb as a model for pre-tetrapod limb design isn't completely bunk, the elements are all still there, its just their proportions that are a bit off.

I'm not dead, I'm in Vernal, Utah

I came here at the end of July after an unreasonably hot (105 F) paleo survey in La Quinta, CA. I'll be here until it starts to snow. My time here has re-confirmed for me that fossil hunting, next to golf, is not only one of the best ways to ruin a good walk, but is simultaneously one of the most frustrating and rewarding activities that I can do. More on this later, hopefully pics too. Once again, I'm not dead, just kind of cut off from the outside world.

Bee Mine

Since global warming, while still threatening everyone, has become somewhat old hat for the news media, it would seem that a new threat is assailing man kind: the loss of honey bees. One quotation that has been popularly used and attributed to Einstein is that if bees die out, then man has four years to live. This is based on the idea that the crops that man kind plants are reliant on honey bees for polination, and would therefore send humanity into starvation if bees died out completely. Snopes.com has classified the claim that Einstein ever said this as uncertain. Until 1994, it seems that no such reference had made it to press (which is why writers should always site their references).
Even if Einstein did say it though, he was not an authority on the subject. Certainly he was a briliant physicist and philosopher, but not a biologist. I say that man kind will not die out as a result of the loss of honey bees. Things won't be super, there will be a difficult adjustment periord, but loss of honeybees alone will not kill us off. The main reason for this is that the majority of crops that we grow are self or wind pollenated. All the grasses (corn, wheat, rice, barley, oats) as well as many legumes (peanuts) and soybeans will be wholey unaffected. Furthermore, honeybees are not the only pollenators. North America alone has more than 3500 species of native bees (most of which don't produce colonies though) which would rise to fill the vacated niche. Also, many species of wasps, beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, ants, bats and hummingbirds also pollenate flowers. Honey bees are not even native to the western hemisphere.
The human reaction to a decrease in honey bees is already seen. Many bee keepers truck their hives from field to field, following the bloom north and are paid well for it. The use of monoculture (only one type of crop in an area) is also declining in some areas so that bees will have a more consistant food suply throughout the year. Similarly, proximity to native grassland or forest also bolster pollination of many crops because native pollinators are more abundant. In the end, if things become too unmanageable, it is likely that new crops or hybrids that don't rely so much on honey bees will be implemented and that agricultural engineers might even produce a mechanical method for mass pollination.
The moral to be learned from this is not that man-kind is doomed, but that we are going to have to learn to be good stuards of our planet, for its sake and for ours.

While Banging My Head on the Desk

The Creation Museum in Kentucky has finally opened after several years of fighting over permits. The museum teaches a 6-day, literal interpretation of the story of genesis and has anamatronics, multi-sensory cinematic productions and all the other things that a $27 million budget gets a museum. Everything that is except for reasonable scientists to currate it and probably also a fossil collection.
Thankfully, because this place is privately owned, it does not count as a governmentally recognised repository for fossils from public lands, but that probably won't stop the owner from purchasing a large collection of fossils that would seem to support his 6-day creation belief.
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