Blue Collar Scientist

One of the things I emphasize to my students is that a lot of the better research going on today is interdisciplinary, in which scientists from completely different fields collaborate to study a phenomenon and the scientific results are improved from the participation of folks that have different knowledge and different backgrounds.

Yesterday I spent a little time in my own cross-disciplinary scientific world. I wasn’t really contributing anything, I was soaking up the awesome coolness that is Tom Kaye.

Tom’s a sort of modern gentleman-scientist, of the sort that nearly went extinct shortly after Darwin’s time when the cost of doing scientific research began to require funding that was not available even to the very rich. I’ve known Tom by reputation for years; back in 2000, he had a telescope set up at a friend’s observatory where he made the first amateur astronomer detection of an exoplanet using the radial velocity method. He’s also the guy that got hold of Norm Oberle’s 1-meter mirror blank; I knew Norm back when I lived in Ohio, have seen the blank, and knew that someone had bought it, but never knew who until I went to dinner with Tom a few nights ago.

Tom’s neck-deep in astronomy, but he’s also a paleontologist, and he’s specifically looking at a possible connection between gamma-ray bursters, the K-T boundary extinction, and the Chicxulub impactor. To support this research, Tom has a bunch of fossils, K-T boundary samples, microscopes, and atomic composition analysis equipment.

And when I say microscopes, I mean microscopes. He’s got everything from a simple stereo microscope, to a couple of the nicest compound binocular microscopes ever made, and even two electron microscopes. We slapped a spider leg into one of the electron microscopes and took a look at it in all its hairy, spikey glory. Really cool stuff - I’ve never had a chance to play with a microscope before.

Tom was kind enough to donate a bunch of hadrosaur teeth to me for use in my educational programs, along with a sauropod stomach stone and some 35 million year old fossilized poop. And we’re going to work at the beginning of next school year on putting together some brief educational videos for use in the classroom, and maybe even set him up so that he can visit my classes through webcam to talk about his research.

It’s amazing the people you meet in my line of work.

NewsDaily, Shortnews, and a bunch of other outlets are reporting that Rhys Nichols has discovered dinosaur tracks while walking on the beach near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, with his father. Rhys is eight years old, proving the oft-repeated adage that paleontology and astronomy are the two disciplines to which amateurs commonly make scientific contributions.

It is reported they are probably Iguanodon tracks from the Jurassic.

“This is a great find as dinosaur prints are not normally that clear,” archaeologist Will Watts said, “Looking at the size of the prints, the dinosaur was probably the same size as Rhys.”

Umm - archaeologist?

Researchers at the University of Oslo Natural History Museum have announced the discovery of an enormous marine reptile - a 50-foot (15 meter) pliosaur.

The pliosaur was found in the arctic island chain of Svalbard (the BBC reports it was found on Spitzbergen) by a “team of Norwegian paleontologists and volunteers from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum” and their principal investigator, Jørn Hurum. But at least one Alaskan, Patrick Druckenmiller, was involved with the find. A plesiosaur specialist at the University of Alaska Museum, he’s quoted in the press release as saying:

“Although we didn’t get the entire skeleton, we found many of the most important parts, including portions of the skull, teeth, much of the neck and back, the shoulder girdle, and a nearly complete forelimb (paddle)” said Druckenmiller, “Amazingly, the paddle alone is nearly 10 feet long.”

In a bit of a departure from established taxonomy practices and the usual reticince to announce such things before a paper has passed peer review, the PI says:

“From the bones we have finished stabilizing so far this absolutely looks like a new species” Jørn Hurum tells enthusiastically.

The fossil is 150 million years old, putting it in the late Jurassic.

One of the things interesting to me about this find is how many significant fossils are coming out of the arctic or nearctic in the last decade or so. Finds like Tiktaalik roseae, the Axel Heiberg champsosaurs, the Victoria Island acritarchs, the Colville River finds, the Bathurst Island vascular plants, Greenland’s Ichthyostega, and so on. This could be for any or all of a number of reasons:

• The arctic is well-mapped geologically, mainly by the oil companies, allowing paleontologists to conduct well-planned digs at carefully selected locations.
• More easily accessible areas are already pretty well prospected.
• Arctic areas don’t have a lot of trees on the ground to interfere with access to fossils.
• Until relatively recently, access was prohibitively expensive, especially if you wanted to transport fossils out.
• In this case, the Svalbard Tourism Board made the prospect of a working vacation irresistable.

Anyway, now we can chalk up another interesting arctic find. According to the BBC, they’ve done a literature search, and this is apparently the biggest pliosaur ever.