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The Largest Ammonite Ever Found?

The Largest Ammonite Ever Found?

Parapuzosia seppenradensis, biggest known ammonite, diameter 1.80 m. stands in the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster . The Ju...

Newly Discovered Cousin of T. Rex Was a Pint-Sized Killer

dinosaur, Fossils 11:08 PM

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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mIyciaO0dJo/XN3CuQtOYUI/AAAAAAAARAA/jgIB_jJwKdQ4U8iOs8NwCI5NPGdD_IVhACLcBGAs/s1600/Newly%2BDiscovered%2BCousin%2Bof%2BT.%2BRex%2BWas%2Ba%2BPint-Sized%2BKiller.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Newly Discovered Cousin of T. Rex Was a Pint-Sized Killer" border="0" data-original-height="860" data-original-width="1432" height="384" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mIyciaO0dJo/XN3CuQtOYUI/AAAAAAAARAA/jgIB_jJwKdQ4U8iOs8NwCI5NPGdD_IVhACLcBGAs/s640/Newly%2BDiscovered%2BCousin%2Bof%2BT.%2BRex%2BWas%2Ba%2BPint-Sized%2BKiller.jpg" title="" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This  photo provided by Virginia Tech shows the fossilized bones of <i>Suskityrannus hazelae.</i></td></tr>
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A new relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex -- much smaller than the huge, ferocious dinosaur made famous in countless books and films, including, yes, "Jurassic Park" -- has been discovered and named by a Virginia Tech paleontologist and an international team of scientists.<br />
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The newly named tyrannosauroid dinosaur -- <i>Suskityrannus hazelae</i> -- stood roughly 3 feet tall at the hip and was about 9 feet in length, the entire animal only marginally longer than the just the skull of a fully grown Tyrannosaurus rex, according to Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor with Department of Geosciences in the Virginia Tech College of Science. In a wild twist to this discovery, Nesbitt found the fossil at age 16 whilst a high school student participating in a dig expedition in New Mexico in 1998, led by Doug Wolfe, an author on the paper.<br />
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In all, <i>Suskityrannus hazelae</i> is believed to have weighed between 45 and 90 pounds. The typical weight for a full-grown Tyrannosaurus rex is roughly 9 tons. Its diet likely consisted of the same as its larger meat-eating counterpart, with Suskityrannus hazelae likely hunting small animals, although what it hunted is unknown. The dinosaur was at least 3 years old at death based on an analysis of its growth from its bones.<br />
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The fossil dates back 92 million years to the Cretaceous Period, a time when some of the largest dinosaurs ever found lived.<br />
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"<i>Suskityrannus</i> gives us a glimpse into the evolution of tyrannosaurs just before they take over the planet," Nesbitt said. "It also belongs to a dinosaurian fauna that just proceeds the iconic dinosaurian faunas in the latest Cretaceous that include some of the most famous dinosaurs, such as the Triceratops, predators like Tyrannosaurus rex, and duckbill dinosaurs like Edmotosaurus."<br />
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The findings are published in the latest online issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution. In describing the new find, Nesbitt said, "Suskityrannus has a much more slender skull and foot than its later and larger cousins, the Tyrannosaurus rex. The find also links the older and smaller tyrannosauroids from North America and China with the much larger tyrannosaurids that lasted until the final extinction of non-avian dinosaurs.<br />
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(Tyrannosaurus rex small arm jokes abound. So, if you're wondering how small the arms of Suskityrannus were, Nesbitt and his team are not exactly sure. No arm fossils of either specimen were found, but partial hand claws were found. And, they are quite small. Also not known: If Suskityrannus had two or three fingers.)<br />
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Two partial skeletons were found. The first included a partial skull that was found in 1997 by Robert Denton, now a senior geologist with Terracon Consultants, and others in the Zuni Basin of western New Mexico during an expedition organized by Zuni Paleontological Project leader Doug Wolfe.<br />
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The second, more complete specimen was found in 1998 by Nesbitt, then a high school junior with a burgeoning interest in paleontology, and Wolfe, with assistance in collection by James Kirkland, now of the Utah Geological Survey. "Following Sterling out to see his dinosaur, I was amazed at how complete a skeleton was lying exposed at the site," Kirkland said.<br />
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For much of the 20 years since the fossils were uncovered, the science team did not know what they had.<br />
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"Essentially, we didn't know we had a cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex for many years," Nesbitt said. He added the team first thought they had the remains of a dromaeosaur, such as Velociraptor. During the late 1990s, close relatives Tyrannosaurus rex simply were not known or not recognized. Since then, more distant cousins of Tyrannosaurus rex, such as Dilong paradoxus, have been found across Asia.<br />
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The fossil remains were found near other dinosaurs, along with the remains of fish, turtles, mammals, lizards, and crocodilians. From 1998 until 2006, the fossils remain stored at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa, Arizona. After 2006, Nesbitt brought the fossils with him through various postings as student and researcher in New York, Texas, Illinois, and now Blacksburg. He credits the find, and his interactions with the team members on the expedition, as the start of his career.<br />
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"My discovery of a partial skeleton of <i>Suskityrannus </i>put me onto a scientific journey that has framed my career," said Nesbitt, also a member of the Virginia Tech Global Change Center. "I am now an assistant professor that gets to teach about Earth history."<br />
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The name Suskityrannus hazelae is derived from "Suski," the Zuni Native American tribe word for "coyote," and from the Latin word 'tyrannus' meaning king and 'hazelae' for Hazel Wolfe, whose support made possible many successful fossil expeditions in the Zuni Basin. Nesbitt said permission was granted from the Zuni Tribal Council to use the word "Suski."<br />
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<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2019/05/science-mini_tyrannosaurus_rex_Suskityrannus_Nesbitt.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Materials</a> provided by <a href="http://www.vt.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Virginia Tech</a>. </span></i></u><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br />
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Newly Discovered Cousin of T. Rex Was a Pint-Sized Killer

This photo provided by Virginia Tech shows the fossilized bones of Suskityrannus hazelae. A new relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex -...

From Earth's Deep Mantle, Scientists Find a New Way Volcanoes Form

earth, Tectonic, volcano 11:22 PM

From Earth's Deep Mantle, Scientists Find a New Way Volcanoes Form

Bermuda has a unique volcanic past. About 30 million years ago, a disturbance in the mantle’s transition zone supplied the magma to form ...

The Moon Is Shrinking and That's Causing Moonquakes

moon, NASA, Tectonic 11:07 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This prominent thrust fault on the moon is one of thousands discovered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).<br />
Credit: LROC NAC frame M190844037LR; NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/Smithsonian</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The moon is shrinking. And as the crust of our lone satellite contracts, it tugs on cliff-like cracks on the surface, leading to lots of moonquakes, scientists just discovered.</span><br />
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The Moon is shrinking as its interior cools, getting more than about 150 feet (50 meters) skinnier over the last several hundred million years. Just as a grape wrinkles as it shrinks down to a raisin, the Moon gets wrinkles as it shrinks. Unlike the flexible skin on a grape, the Moon’s surface crust is brittle, so it breaks as the Moon shrinks, forming “thrust faults” where one section of crust is pushed up over a neighboring part.<br />
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“Our analysis gives the first evidence that these faults are still active and likely producing moonquakes today as the Moon continues to gradually cool and shrink,” said Thomas Watters, senior scientist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. “Some of these quakes can be fairly strong, around five on the Richter scale.”<br />
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These fault scarps resemble small stair-step shaped cliffs when seen from the lunar surface, typically tens of yards (meters) high and extending for a few miles (several kilometers). Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt had to zig-zag their lunar rover up and over the cliff face of the Lee-Lincoln fault scarp during the Apollo 17 mission that landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley in 1972.<br />
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Watters is lead author of a study that analyzed data from four seismometers placed on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts using an algorithm, or mathematical program, developed to pinpoint quake locations detected by a sparse seismic network. The algorithm gave a better estimate of moonquake locations. Seismometers are instruments that measure the shaking produced by quakes, recording the arrival time and strength of various quake waves to get a location estimate, called an epicenter. The study was published in Nature Geoscience.<br />
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Astronauts placed the instruments on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, and 16 missions. The Apollo 11 seismometer operated only for three weeks, but the four remaining recorded 28 shallow moonquakes – the type expected to be produced by these faults – from 1969 to 1977. The quakes ranged from about 2 to around 5 on the Richter scale.<br />
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Using the revised location estimates from the new algorithm, the team found that eight of the 28 shallow quakes were within 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) of faults visible in lunar images. This is close enough to tentatively attribute the quakes to the faults, since modeling by the team shows that this is the distance over which strong shaking is expected to occur, given the size of these fault scarps. Additionally, the new analysis found that six of the eight quakes happened when the Moon was at or near its apogee, the farthest point from Earth in its orbit. This is where additional tidal stress from Earth’s gravity causes a peak in the total stress, making slip-events along these faults more likely.<br />
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“We think it’s very likely that these eight quakes were produced by faults slipping as stress built up when the lunar crust was compressed by global contraction and tidal forces, indicating that the Apollo seismometers recorded the shrinking Moon and the Moon is still tectonically active,” said Watters. The researchers ran 10,000 simulations to calculate the chance of a coincidence producing that many quakes near the faults at the time of greatest stress. They found it is less than 4 percent. Additionally, while other events, such as meteoroid impacts, can produce quakes, they produce a different seismic signature than quakes made by fault slip events.<br />
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Other evidence that these faults are active comes from highly detailed images of the Moon by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has imaged over 3,500 of the fault scarps. Some of these images show landslides or boulders at the bottom of relatively bright patches on the slopes of fault scarps or nearby terrain. Weathering from solar and space radiation gradually darkens material on the lunar surface, so brighter areas indicate regions that are freshly exposed to space, as expected if a recent moonquake sent material sliding down a cliff.<br />
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 Examples of fresh boulder fields are found on the slopes of a fault scarp in the Vitello cluster and examples of possible bright features are associated with faults that occur near craters Gemma Frisius C and Mouchez L. Other LROC fault images show tracks from boulder falls, which would be expected if the fault slipped and the resulting quake sent boulders rolling down the cliff slope. These tracks are evidence of a recent quake because they should be erased relatively quickly, in geologic time scales, by the constant rain of micrometeoroid impacts on the Moon. Boulder tracks near faults in Schrödinger basin have been attributed to recent boulder falls induced by seismic shaking.<br />
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Additionally, one of the revised moonquake epicenters is just 13 kilometers (8 miles) from the Lee-Lincoln scarp traversed by the Apollo 17 astronauts. The astronauts also examined boulders and boulder tracks on the slope of North Massif near the landing site. A large landslide on South Massif that covered the southern segment of the Lee-Lincoln scarp is further evidence of possible moonquakes generated by fault slip events.<br />
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“It’s really remarkable to see how data from nearly 50 years ago and from the LRO mission has been combined to advance our understanding of the Moon while suggesting where future missions intent on studying the Moon’s interior processes should go,” said LRO Project Scientist John Keller of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.<br />
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Since LRO has been photographing the lunar surface since 2009, the team would like to compare pictures of specific fault regions from different times to see if there is any evidence of recent moonquake activity. Additionally, “Establishing a new network of seismometers on the lunar surface should be a priority for human exploration of the Moon, both to learn more about the Moon’s interior and to determine how much of a hazard moonquakes present,” said co-author Renee Weber, a planetary seismologist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.<br />
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The Moon isn’t the only world in our solar system experiencing some shrinkage with age. Mercury has enormous thrust faults -- up to about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) long and over a mile (3 kilometers) high -- that are significantly larger relative to its size than those on the Moon, indicating it shrank much more than the Moon. Since rocky worlds expand when they heat up and contract as they cool, Mercury’s large faults reveal that is was likely hot enough to be completely molten after its formation. Scientists trying to reconstruct the Moon’s origin wonder whether the same happened to the Moon, or if instead it was only partially molten, perhaps with a magma ocean over a more slowly heating deep interior. The relatively small size of the Moon’s fault scarps is in line with the more subtle contraction expected from a partially molten scenario.<br />
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NASA will send the first woman, and next man, to the Moon by 2024. These American astronauts will take a human landing system from the Gateway in lunar orbit, and land on the lunar South Pole. The agency will establish sustainable missions by 2028, then we’ll take what we learn on the Moon, and go to Mars.<br />
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This research was funded by NASA’s LRO project, with additional support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. LRO is managed by NASA Goddard for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The LROC is managed at Arizona State University in Tempe.<br />
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<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2019/moonquakes" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">NASA</a>.</span></i></u></div>

The Moon Is Shrinking and That's Causing Moonquakes

This prominent thrust fault on the moon is one of thousands discovered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Credit: LROC NA...

Ninety-nine-million-year-old Ammonite Trapped in Amber Discovered for First Time

amber, Earth History 10:44 PM

Ninety-nine-million-year-old Ammonite Trapped in Amber Discovered for First Time

Amber Piece Showing Most Large Inclusions Credit NIGPAS Ancient marine organisms found trapped in amber alongside bugs and snails A...

Moonstone Vs Opal — What's the Difference?

gemstones, Mineralogy 10:48 PM

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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LlF1aR09wjs/XNnJszwuVII/AAAAAAAAQ_E/UBO2EMGnnSMtQ7KyRf34ZuT4p37lNfUHACLcBGAs/s1600/Moonstone%2BVs%2BOpal%2B%25E2%2580%2594%2BWhat%2527s%2Bthe%2BDifference%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Moonstone Vs Opal — What's the Difference? " border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="426" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LlF1aR09wjs/XNnJszwuVII/AAAAAAAAQ_E/UBO2EMGnnSMtQ7KyRf34ZuT4p37lNfUHACLcBGAs/s640/Moonstone%2BVs%2BOpal%2B%25E2%2580%2594%2BWhat%2527s%2Bthe%2BDifference%2B%25281%2529.jpg" title="" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Definition: </span></span></h4>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Moonstone</b> is a sodium potassium aluminium silicate with the chemical formula (Na,K)AlSi<sub>3</sub>O<sub>8</sub> and belongs to the feldspar group. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Opal</b> is a hydrated amorphous form of silica; its water content may range from 3 to 21% by weight, but is usually between 6 and 10%. </span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Chemistry: </span></span></h4>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Moonstone </b>is composed of two feldspar species, orthoclase and albite. The two species are intermingled. Then, as the newly formed mineral cools, the intergrowth of orthoclase and albite separates into stacked, alternating layers.</span><br />
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<b>Opal</b> is a hydrated amorphous form of silica (SiO<sub>2</sub>·nH<sub>2</sub>O), It is deposited at a relatively low temperature and may occur in the fissures of almost any kind of rock, being most commonly found with limonite, sandstone, rhyolite, marl, and basalt.</div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Cause of Color</span></span></h4>
<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Blue Moonstone</span></b> is a gem from the feldspar group and is composed of layers of albite – potassium rich aluminium silicate and orthoclase – sodium rich aluminum silicate. The schiller is produced because of light interference caused by the light having to weave its way through the layers with slightly different optical properties. The adularescence is caused by scattered light passing through the exsolution lamellae that act as scattering centres, creating a bluish hue/ lustre.<br />
<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Precious Opal</span></b> - is opal which exhibits the phenomenon known as play of colour, which is produced by the diffraction of white light through a micro-structure of orderly arrayed spheres of silica.The internal structure of precious opal makes it diffract light; depending on the conditions in which it formed, it can take on many colors.<br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Types and colors: </span></span></h4>
<b>Moonstones</b> come in a variety of colors. The body color can range from colorless to gray, brown, yellow, green, or pink. The clarity ranges from transparent to translucent.<br />
There are many different types of<b> natural opals</b>. There is black opal, white opal, crystal opal and jelly opal. There are other kinds - fire opal, hyalite, water opal, hydrophane and honey opal.<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">See also:</span></b><br />
<a href="https://www.geologyin.com/2016/06/types-of-opal-with-photos.html" target="_blank">Types of Opal With Photos</a><br />
<a href="https://www.geologyin.com/2018/07/different-types-and-colours-of-moonstone.html" target="_blank">Different Types and Colours of Moonstone</a><br />
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