B-Rex on 60 Minutes

The CBS news program 60 Minutes had reporter Leslie Stahl interview Jack Horner and Mary Schweitzer (North Carolina State University) about trying to re-creating dinosaurs using chickens.  The B-rex named in the title is named after a T-rex specimen found by Bob Harmon in 2000.  The fossil was too big to airlift from the find location so they cut it to reduce weight. The part of the cut fossil bone were then sent to researcher Dr. Schwitzer who after dissolving pieces in acid found a soft tissue like substance.  She was able to reproduce this with other dinosaur fossils.  Now they are trying to find DNA which could then be used to replicate a dinosaur.

Here is a direct link to the story if the embedded video is not showing up correctly on Blogger.  Dinosaur fossil cast shown in this post does not relate to this story and is just here for reference. It is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as of August 2010.

Mr. Horner will be at the University of Kentucky in February 2011 for a free lecture.  See earlier post for more information about that lecture.  Jack Horner and James Gorman have a book as well entitled How To Build a Dinosaur - Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever that one can find on Amazon.com

Pliosaur Fossil to Be CT Scanned

Skull fragments of a 10-16 m pliosaur marine reptile found in 2009 (Dorset, England) will be CT scanned at the University of Southhampton in the UK according to a December 22, 2010, BBC story.

This link leads to the story by Rebecca Morelle entitled, "Colossal pliosaur fossil secrets revealed by CT scanner". Learn more at that video link provided.

 Rhomaleosaurus cramptoni at British Natural History Museum 2005

photo by Niki Odolphie (Frome, England) 

Posted on Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attributions 2.0

The marine reptile known as the Pliosaur existed in the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods (learn more at this Wikipedia link).

Merry Fossil Christmas 2010

Merry Christmas to one and all!  May you get lots of geological goodies this holiday season.  Hope the new year brings good health and safe travels.

For the curious, this years image contains fossils from four time periods.  The star, red and blue ornaments are Ordovician crinoid stem pieces of Madison, Indiana.  The trunk is an unidentified crinoid stem from the Silurian Waldron Shale of Clark County, Indiana.  The tree body is an unidentified horn coral from the Devonian Jeffersonville Limestone of Clark County, Indiana.  Last, the yellow ornaments are unidentified crinoid/blastoid stem pieces from the Mississippian Period limestones of Crawford County, Indiana.  All the fossils have had their colors modified to match a real Christmas tree.

See this April 2010 blog post on the Ordovician crinoid pieces for their identifications.