Gulfzilla!!

Top Ten BP Excuses

10."The Gulf of Mexico was overdue for its 3,000 oil change"

9."We promise we'll get around to it by Labor Day"

8."Relax, it's only leaking 210,000 gallons a day"

7."Giving everyone a free BP travel mug"

6."Louisiana hasn't had a disaster in 5 years"

5."Guy from Goldman Sachs said it would make money"

4."Blame FEMA"

3."Did you hear Ricky Martin's gay?"

2."Blame Toyota"

1."Honestly, we're so reckless -- surprised it took this long"

From Late Night With David Letterman (5/3/10)

Algore-a-saurus

Global Warming and the Dinosaurs: Fossil Discoveries at the Poles

Description:
Dinosaurs are usually pictured in warm, tropical environments, but fossils found at the poles are filling in the gap of knowledge about how and where these creatures lived. Evidence from bones and teeth to trackways and skin impressions raises important questions: How did dinosaurs cope with three months of total darkness in winter? What plants grew in the polar regions? How cold was it? What are the implications for today, as glaciers retreat, ice shelves melt, and permafrost thaws? The polar regions are a unique "library" of the past, and Caroline Arnold introduces readers to the gigantic prehistoric creatures that inhabited them.

I Still Have a Chance!!

At bargain basement prices, too!

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AFP) – A 66-million-old Tyrannosaurus Rex named Samson failed to sell at a Las Vegas auction after the top bid of 3.6 million dollars fell way below the minimum price.

... Samson, which is a little less well preserved, was one of 17 dinosaur and fossil items which failed to sell Saturday, in a sign of the depressed economy.

Just a Teeny Bit Challenging

Day two passed without notice, but Day Three has been a little harder. Besieged by coupons and distracted by a Lucky magazine, I struggle slightly to stay the course. Most offers can be deleted without a second thought, or tossed right into the trash with other junk mail. But wait, Ulta decides to play dirty. No less than four days after redeeming a “$3.50 off any purchase $10 or more” coupon there (a transaction in which I did a spectacular job of barely meeting the minimum in order to maximize the discount as close to the allowable 35% as possible, I might add) here comes an even better offer! This one promises $5 off a ten dollar purchase. Hmmm. NO WAY can I pass that up. I look at the expiration date: October 24. Hmmm. I tuck it away. That’s late in the challenge. And facial cleanser is a necessity. Can’t walk around with a dirty face. I decide to delay a decision until another day. I tuck it in my coupon folder. I should clean it out, but that just might lead to some forgotten little gem about to expire. As aforementioned, you never know when a Defcon 4 ESS could arise…

Emergency Shopping Scenario #2

Robber with Gun: Hands in the air! This is a hold-up!

Me: I’ll say.

Robber: Quick! Open that register and give me all your
cash.

Clerk: I-I-I-I can’t! It’s locked. You have to have a
transaction to open the till.

Me: Do I have to do everything here?
(heavy sigh) Ok, here’s my $10 off any shoe purchase.

I’d like to see those, those, and those in a size six. And I fully expect double points for averting a disaster.

Entirely possible.

I’ve decided to start a list of the things I would like to buy. Perhaps that will allow some time for introspection and allow for a cooler head to prevail. Plus, I really like making lists. At the top of my list is a military jacket. I see Banana Republic is advertising one for $170. This is at least four times what I would normally spend, but I may find at the end of the month I have surplus cash equaling the GNP of Chad, so I’m not ruling anything out. Or, perhaps I won’t even feel the urge to buy any more clothes. I can save up for meaningful, lasting things like a new Corvette, or a dinosaur.

So what do you think? Will I emerge having taken the Master Card off my back? Or will it be one huge Coupon Carnival when it’s all over?

Feathers! Half-off.

What Gets Dug Up in the Dakotas...

Never stays in the Dakotas.

Museums and high-rolling natural history buffs will get a crack at buying a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex next month at a Las Vegas Strip auction.

Yes!!

I need a winning lottery ticket!

I missed out on Sue, and I don't' want to miss Samson. My foyer needs a conversation piece.

Experts say the 170 bones discovered about 17 years ago in South Dakota represent more than half the skeleton of a 40-foot-long, 7.5 ton dinosaur that lived 66 million years ago. Discovered? Poached? Appropriated? Stolen by the U.S. Government? Can't wait to find out.

Auctioneer Bonhams & Butterfields is hoping that bids for the T. rex dubbed "Samson" will top
$6 million when it is sold Oct. 3 at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
A similar T. rex fossil sold in 1997 for $8.3 million and is now housed at the Field Museum in Chicago. That dinosaur, named "Sue," is 42 feet long and has more than 200 fossilized bones.
Tom Lindgren, a natural history specialist for Bonhams & Butterfields, said "Samson" is the third most complete T. rex skeleton ever discovered, and one of only 42 specimens discovered in the last 100 years with more than 10 percent of the bones.

"This represents the pinnacle of paleontology," Lindgren told The Associated Press on Friday.
"Most of the major museums in the world have casts of T. rexes," as opposed to the real thing, he said. "Bidding on this T. rex is not going to be a gamble, it's going to be the opportunity of a lifetime to whoever gets it." And will look great in my living room!

The female dinosaur's lower jaw was found by the son of a rancher in 1987 and the rest of its bones were excavated in 1992, Lindgren said. It was sold twice to private owners, and is now owned by an American whom Lindgren wouldn't name. Sam Zell? Donald Trump? Bernie Madoff? Bill Gates? No, he's still solvent.

Lindgren said most of the dinosaur's bones have been stored in a warehouse and have never been on exhibit privately or publicly. He would not say how much its current owner invested in it, but said it is more than the $6 million to $8 million he estimates it will sell for. Their loss is my gain. Didn't even have to get cold or dusty digging it up. Win-Win!

Lindgren said the estimate is conservative, in part because it is already mounted on a custom steel frame designed for museum display and scientific study. Or placement in a private residence. Party ready!

"Sue" was sold unmounted in 1997, he said. The Field Museum put it on display in 2000.
Lindgren said factors that could drive down the price include the economy. He also said the owner who wants to sell the dinosaur as soon as possible, leaving potential bidders scrambling to quickly come up with the money. If only...

Lindgren said private bidders are welcome, but he and its owners want to see "Samson" end up at a museum or scientific institution, studied further and put on public display. After my death.

The T. rex is being sold along with 41 other lots of museum-ready pieces, including a 28-foot duck-billed dinosaur skeleton and a 7-foot fossil shark. The collection will be on public preview for two weeks before the auction. Fossil shark? Sounds nice for the rec room.

Along with the T. rex skeleton's mounted bones, hundreds of bone fragments in plastic bags and bins could help scientists piece together more of "Samson" -- if they are willing to invest potentially thousands of hours. No problem. I have several friends who love jigsaw puzzles and natural history.

"If a museum buys this, they can afford to sit there and over a period of time, put the pieces together," Lindgren said. "It could take years to put the rest of the bone fragments together."

Ina Gadda Da-Ida*

Ida like to be rich enough to keep this in my closet for twenty years...

Missing link? Or just a really good public relations firm? All I can say is, I enjoyed the History Channel special and think anything promoting science over Lindsay Lohan's love life is to be embraced.

Read this helpful article for some quick points. Did you catch the Google logo? Cute!

Bottom Line: One of the best fossils ever found, as it is so complete and even shows stomach contents! Let's see how good you look after 47 million years.

*Dr Jorn Hurum of Norway named the fossil after his daughter and pronounces it "E-da"

I Was Hoping for a Cookbook...

Just wanted to elaborate a bit on the book "How to Build a Dinosaur" by Jack Horner. I can't really recommend you rush out and buy the book, parts of it were downright somnifacient, but the central thesis was so intriguing, I really must discuss.

Horner explains the whole conceit of Jurassic Park - finding a mosquito preserved in amber that had dinosaur blood in it from which a whole new dinosaur could be created millions of years later - is a great science fiction story plot, but not necessary. Instead, he suggests efforts towards De-evolution: taking a chicken egg, a bird we know to be closely related to the dinosaur, and reprogramming the egg to grow not a chicken, but a much more primitive creature.

Well, this to me is about the greatest idea since intermittent windshield wipers. I can't wait to get started! Unfortunately, the book did not include do-it-yourself tips or recipes.

Scientists have studied the development of the chicken embryo and can pinpoint the hour in incubation where items like eyes, beaks, or wings are created. By going down to the molecular level of cell development and turning on or off the switches that create a particular appendage, it is possible to grow an arm where a wing would be, or a tail where the spinal cord would normally end. So instead of a modern chicken developing, we could go further back into the evolutionary tree and see... a dinosaur?

Perhaps. No one knows exactly what one looked like. We would have only the fossil record to compare it to, but it's an excellent suggestion and I say full steam ahead! I'd love a little Archaeopteryx or Deinonychus.

Dream Job

I love fossils! I'm obsessively clean. I'd love to clean Sue the Tyrannosaur at the Field Museum!

I Don't Think So!

Foiling Pteranodon Takeoffs Since the Cretaceous!

So the lead story at Yahoo News tonight is the plane crash in the Hudson. What upset me about their little post was their encapsulation of the story as a link to read more.

It read: Birds to blame

Excuse me? Birds? Those cute little fluffy descendants of dinosaurs that have been on earth say, a hundred million years???? While we humans have been polluting up the sky some oh, one hundred? That's one hundred, period. Not one hundred thousand. Not one hundred million. Nope. Using 1903's Kitty Hawk launch, I'd say we were the brash newcomer here, wouldn't you? Not like we've each developed the ability to 'see' the earth's magnetic fields or anything, eh?

Anyhoo, nice to know no one was killed. Well, except for those birds! In the waning days of the Bush administration, I'm sure this incident will be blamed on Hummingbird Hamas or Al-Queda Kites or something... see the NY Times Daily Intel to prove I'm not alone on this airstream.

But my outrage goes on: while researching the whole bird evolution question, I typed in "When did birds appear on Earth" into Google.

Oh, WikiAnswers, that looks good, I thought.

Not so much. Nothing like being fundamentally right.

What to do? Well, frankly this group scares me: Bird Strike Committee USA

They certainly dramatize the 218 people killed by birds striking aircraft, but catch this little line:

About 90% of all bird strikes in the U.S. are by species federally protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

look closer, and see that it was preceded by:

The nesting population of bald eagles in the contiguous USA increased from fewer than 400 pairs in 1970 (2 years before DDT and similar chlorinated-hydrocarbon insecticides were banned) to over 11,000 pairs in 2007. Over 100 bald eagle strikes with civil aircraft have been reported in USA, 1990-2007. Mean body mass of bald eagles = 9.1 lbs (male); 11.8 lbs (female).

Ah-Ha!! Just remove federal protection from Bald Eagles and California Condors and voila! Problem solved. We can shoot them within a five hundred mile radius of any airport. Call Sara Palin! There's some huntin' licences to be issued!

Hero on the Half Shell

These guys look huge, but the fossil was only sixteen inches in length

"Their ventral body armor speaks to how turtles originated in a marine environment, protecting them from predators that could attack them from below"

The Field Museum's own Olivier Rieppel, curator of fossil reptiles, co-wrote a paper introducing the oldest turtle fossil ever found: Odontochelys semitestacea. Discovered in China, the fossil dates to the Triassic and reveals a creature that had both top and bottom teeth ('modern' turtles only have a toothless beak) and only a plastron - bottom shell.

But wait! Colleague Robert Reisz thinks this creature once had a top shell - and lost it due to evolving environmental conditions. So this specimen may not be as primitive as Rieppel thinks...

At any rate, at an estimated 220 million years old, this is the least evolved turtle ever found.

Hoax Days of Summer

From Yahoo Buzz:

A Chupa- what?
Early in the week, video footage emerged of a supposed Chupacabra, the mythological beast said to feast on the blood of farm animals and haunt parts of the U.S. and Latin America. Captured on tape by a Texas sheriff's deputy, the four-legged creature lopes ahead of the police vehicle, at one point turning its face to flash a long, bulbous snout.
Real? Who knows? Some investigators say the animal is possibly a coyote-fox mix; a biologist says it's a pit bull. Regardless, searches for "chupacabra texas" rose 13,424% over the past week, while the deputy's video clip ascended to the #1 spot in the week's top buzzing stories.

I must confess to being one of those searchers... any thing to avoid campaign coverage.

A Big- who?
Within days of the Chupacabra video, news broke that two men in northern Georgia had found the corpse of a Bigfoot—or so they claimed. Though the press conference to present the "evidence" wouldn't happen until the end of the week, the buzz around the revelation quickly reached a fevered pitch.

Pluh-eeze. I saw a picture of one of the guys, he looks real credible. More like PT Barnum, if you ask me. Nice to realize this is the only "Georgia" search term the average American is seeking information on...


In just one day, more than 100 distinct searches related to the hairy monster besieged the Search box. In Buzz, a CNET article on the fervor topped the week's most popular science stories. Regrettably, the Friday press event left many questions unanswered.


I guess I can finally admit to keeping the Loch Ness monster in my garage. I just hose her down now and then to keep her moist. Missing your cat? Might want to check my compost pile. Little collars with bells tend to come back up.

Steg-a-Score-us!

Found this adorable plush dino at a restaurant gift shop and decided to buy his little friend the Woolly Mammoth, too! I did a Dinosaur display on my mantle that looked very nice. I put the mammoth off to the side, over on the stereo, since I wanted to include him but am a bit of a purist when it comes to large mammals shown alongside dinosaurs. (Please ignore the fact that I totally mixed eras on the dinosaurs.)

I don’t have an Ice Age genre yet, so do let me know if you see a nice Saber-Toothed Tiger or Dyer Wolf anywhere. Cavemen need not apply.