How to Build a Dinosaur Lecture

The KY-AIPG is sponsoring a FREE lecture that is open to the public by Jack Horner.  It will take place on Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 7:30 PM.  Jack's lecture is entitled "How to Build a Dinosaur - Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever".  John R. "Jack" Horner is curator & teacher of paleontology at Museum of the Rockies (Montana State University at Bozeman).  He was a technical adviser for some of the Jurassic Park movies.

Event will be held at:

Singletary Center for the Arts

University of Kentucky

405 Rose St.

Lexington, KY 40506

Sponsored by the University of Kentucky -Kentucky Geological Survey and Morehead State University.

Learn more by reading their PDF flier found at this site: http://ky.aipg.org/PDF/HornerPoster.pdf

Dendritic Crystal Growth

Sometimes these are considered pseudofossils but they are manganese oxides - dendritic crystal growth.  This specimen was found in Solnhofen, Bayern, Germany.  It is on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (2010).

One of the Oldest Petrified Woods

This Callixylon newberryi plant fossil is of the late Devonian period.  Fossils like this are considered some of the oldest petrified woods in the world.  This piece was found in Bullitt County, Kentucky in the New Albany Shale.

See this post for pictures of larger section of fossil wood on display at the Indiana State Museum.  Also this post about a really large fossil trunk on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.  The Kentucky Paleontological Society has a very nicely prepared and photographed magnified sample seen here.

Below are pictures of the fossil shown at the beginning of this post.  It is a magnified view of a cut and polished section of one end.

 The next slide shows it magnified at 100x.  Need to find a way to fix the camera to the microscope so I can stack images to improve the overall image quality!

This last slide shows a 100x magnification of the long grain view of the wood.