Dinosaur skin

Did you think that fossils were all bones and nothing more? Nope! Some fossils are impressions left of footprints or tracks. Other fossils are impressions left by skin textures. Sometimes even the tissues of an animal can be preserved, or visible in the fossil. It can be hard to figure out what we're looking at in a fossil of a soft-bodied invertebrate from long ago, but dinosaur fossils are usually easier to recognise. Some later dinosaurs may have had skin rather like an elephant, while others had skin and feathers like modern birds. There are many fossils with skin impressions showing scales much like a modern iguana or alligator!

Here are some articles about a dinosaur fossil, a nodosaur, that was preserved with skin or skin impressions and some of its innards: 

Check out this link at https://earthlymission.com/dinosaur-mummy-science-discovery-nodosaur-intact-canada/ - for fascinating photos of a nodosaur fossil found in Canada!

If you like to imagine what it's like to work in the field gathering fossils, try this link  https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dinosaur-mummy-unveiled_n_59187ca4e4b0fe039b35436f - for a video of the attempt to lift the wrapped fossil onto a truck.

For more than this brief note, look to this link for better explanations. https://earthlymission.com/perfectly-preserved-dinosaur-mummy-last-meal-science-study-nodosaur/ - for a discussion of this nodosaur's last meal, and wonderful drawings of the dinosaur as it would have looked alive.

Move Over SUE, There's a New T. rex in Town

Photo by Claire Eamer

by L. E. Carmichael

Of all the dinosaurs in all the world, SUE the T. rex might be the most famous. The most complete T. rex skeleton ever found, SUE is likely also the most well-traveled. Her bones, or at least casts of them, have been displayed all over the world. The casts I saw in Nova Scotia came with bilingual displays written in English and Arabic!

But there's a new king of the dinosaurs in town, and his name is Scotty.

Named after a bottle of Scotch the scientists toasted his 1991 discovery with, Scotty is only 65% complete, compared to SUE's 90%. But he stands out for another reason - as far as we currently know, he's the biggest carnivore ever to walk the earth.

As any forensic anthropologist will tell you, there's a certain amount of instinct and guess-work involved in reconstructing height and weight from nothing but bones. But measurements of Scotty's femur (the long, heavy bone from his thigh) suggest he was in the ballpark of 19,500 pounds - almost a ton more than SUE.

He was also a senior citizen - at approximately 28 years old, Scotty lived longer than any other T. rex we currently know about. And he was a tough old dude, surviving a broken rib, fractured tail bones, and an infected jaw. Those injuries showed signs of healing, meaning they likely weren't his ultimate cause of death.

Now that Canadian palaeontologists have had a chance to study him, Scotty will be making his public debut at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum this May.  No word yet on whether he'll be joining his cousin SUE on tour!

We're all winners! - The Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing

By Claire Eamer

On September 15, I attended a very nice dinner in a very, very nice heritage house in Toronto - and got a very, very, very nice surprise. My book, Before the World Was Ready, Stories of Daring Genius in Science, published by Annick Press, won the 2013 Lane Anderson Award for science writing for young readers.

The Lane Anderson Award is a relatively new award honouring the very best science writing in Canada, both in the adult and young reader categories. It was created and is supported by the Fitzhenry Family Foundation. The official website says, "Each award will be determined on the relevance of its content to the importance of science in today’s world, and the author’s ability to connect the topic to the interests of the general trade reader."

It's an honour - a huge honour. And there's money attached, which is unusual and extremely welcome in the world of book writing.

Now, I knew my book was on the three-book short list - that's why I was at the dinner - but my bets were on another of the shortlisted books. However, I was the only one of the three who could attend the ceremony. We all know or know of each other - that's the nature of kids' science writing in Canada - so we decided to put together a short, joint statement of appreciation, with a bit from each of us.

And here it is - from nominees Jude Isabella, Daniel Loxton, and me, Claire Eamer:

Science writers – and especially children’s science writers – carry collegiality to an extreme. All three of the finalists for the children’s book award would jointly like to thank you for this opportunity and for your recognition of the importance of good, accessible science information that fosters science literacy in both adults and children.

From Jude, who wanted to emphasize the contribution of her long-time Kids Can Press editor, Val Wyatt: “She’s been at it for over 30 years and to me this nomination is a testament to Val’s huge impact on science writing for kids in Canada. There’s just so many writers today that are writing and winning awards and everything that wouldn’t be where they are without Val. She’s just legendary.”

From Daniel: “I'm tremendously grateful not only to the Fitzhenry Family Foundation and the judges for this nomination, but to Kids Can Press and my editor Valerie Wyatt for making this book possible in the first place. To Val especially. It's simply not possible to overstate the importance of a good editor in the life of a writer, and Val is the best.”

From Claire: “In addition to the praise of editors, including my editors at Annick Press, I’d like to add my appreciation for the illustrators of these books – including the astonishing Sa Boothroyd, who illustrated Before the World Was Ready. They grab the attention of kids and keep them reading through what is often pretty complex information.”

And here are the three short-listed books:

Before the World Was Ready, Stories of Daring Genius in Science (Annick Press), by Claire Eamer

Chitchat: Celebrating the World's Languages (Kids Can Press), by Jude Isabella

Pterosaur Trouble (Kids Can Press), by Daniel Loxton

Science News of the Old and Oldest

By Claire Eamer

It's been a busy week or so in the world of science - a lot to keep track of. Here's a quick guide for those who, like me, are feeling a bit overwhelmed.

First, there's the Old: A couple of new dinosaurs have been identified.

One of them is a miniature cousin of the best-known predatory dinosaur, T. rex. This little guy (well relatively little, but still way bigger than any of us) has been named Nanuqsaurus hoglundi - meaning, roughly, polar bear lizard - and he roamed the Arctic 70 million years ago. You can read more about him, and find some pictures, here and here.

The other was found a few thousand kilometres south and east, in the states of North and South Dakota. It's a strange, half-birdlike creature that scientists have nicknamed "the chicken from Hell" - not because it's so scary, although its claws are impressive, but because it was found in a geological formation called Hell Creek. A little more formally, the chicken from Hell is Anzu wyliei, and you can learn more about it here.

And then there's the Oldest: What physicists think is a kind of cosmic fingerprint from the beginning of the universe - evidence of rapid expansion from the first split second after the Big Bang. It has caused a lot of excitement, and a lot of confusion. If you want to get unconfused, here are a few links:

• A handy-dandy non-scientist's guide to what all the excitement is about.
• A story about the impact of the discovery on the scientific world.
• And a delightful short video of one of the scientists who predicted this discovery learning that his prediction appears to have been confirmed.

And that, fellow science fans, is the momentous week that was!

SPOTting the Deep Past

This summer, I went journeying Into The Deep Past again. This time, it wasn't a chance to walk through my home neighbourhood again and see the geological changes that have shaped the world around me. Nope! This time, instead of the familiar hills and ocean shorelines of Vancouver Island, I was exploring the Alberta Badlands along the Red Deer River.

See that tiny dot mid-river, below the bluff? That's me in my kayak!

There are so many ways of showing that process of being in a place and learning to understand what we are seeing. My daughter Lila is a professional photographer; she took the photos above and below, which show me setting out on the river in an inflatable kayak that has served me well in many places close to home, and now on the river.

These photographs contrast well to the painting artist Suzanne Robb made of another location a day's paddle downstream from my launch point. Here, Suzanne shows the striking patterns of weathering that are so visible from the river. The deep runnels that cut into the layers of sediment expose fossils from millions of years ago, when this area was under the shallow Bearpaw Sea.

Suzanne's painting shows the colours as they are felt, instead of the muted way they are shown in Lila's photos. Eroded hillsides looked like dinosaur bones sticking out of the clay and sand -- and yes, there are dinosaur bones all through the sediments from 65 million years ago and older! Other eroded bluffs along the river banks have round faces like Mount Rushmore, and some crumbles have sharp broken edges like profiles of faces looking up-river at the Buffalo Jump.
It's wonderful how different people can be in the same place and create different ways of showing what they have learned. I'm not the photographer that Lila is, nor the painter that Suzanne is. I use other technology to help show people where I've been. One of my best tools is the SPOT device. It's a small electronic device a little bigger than a cell phone. Press the OK button, and it sends a signal to any passing communications satellite to send a pre-written message to up to ten of my friends, with a link to my GPS location on a map.

This is a map of the first message I sent from the Red Deer River.

The map of my second day's travels shows that I went through Dry Island Buffalo Jump Park and camped near Tolman Bridge. The spot marked 4 on the next map shows where I looked at the buffalo jump and the mesa called Dry Island. Some maps look better on a satellite photo, like this one that even shows the shadow of a few little clouds.

The buffalo jump is impressive if you know what you're looking at; a cliff becomes a cliff where the buffalo would fall, not just a crumbly bluff. And below wasn't just a jumble of muddy crumbles mixed with old bones. It was the place where people would have been waiting with spears to finish off the buffalo, after the runners had driven them off the cliff. Falling a hundred feet onto its head doesn't kill a buffalo. But the fall does stun it or break a leg, so it's easier to kill. And then, there's lots of water here from the river and a nearby stream, for the butchering and cooking. The science of buffalo hunting makes sense when you can see the cliff and the water.
The river makes more sense in some ways, too, when I see it on the map that shows how few roads there are in this part of Alberta, or on the satellite photo that shows how the river gouged out its little canyon through this dry land. The SPOT is no substitute for a camera, but it's a good tool to have for keeping track of where I've been. Ultimately, nothing matches being there, feeling the slippery clay clinging to my feet, or the tea-brown river quietly slipping between banks where cattle graze and swallows dart.

I Dig Dinosaurs

One of the reasons I became a children's writer is because I've never grown up. I never have grown out of my fascination for arm-farts, explosions, or dinosaurs.

That's why my recent trip to Alberta's famed Royal Tyrrell Museum was such a dream come true. The Tyrrell sits smack on the pre-eminent fossil-hunting grounds of Drumheller's badlands, and boasts one of the best dinosaur collections in the world. Most of the awe-inspiring fossils in the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum in New York actually come from Drumheller ("stolen" by fossil gold rushers, but that's another story); still, they can't hold a candle to the displays at the Tyrrell.

So without further ado, I'll share some of my photos and experiences with you.



T-Rex, Albertosaurus and Edmontosaurus all hail from Drumheller.



 

Say "Cheese!"

This feller, called Deinonychus, isn't actually a dinosaur - it's a reptile.

 In our family, we always called him "The Potato Chip Monster."

 

In addition to a huge range of skeletons, the Tyrrell also has fabulous dioramas, including one that shows what the waters of ancient times may have looked like. 

Awww... it's a baby....and her just hatched egg.

And living "fossils"  - some Madagascar cockroaches, complete with the hiss.

We were taken behind the scenes, into the workroom where the scientists prepared and studied the fossils.

I love the toy ankylosaurus on the workstation. That's what this researcher is
working on - an incredible find uncovered by accident by miners in the oil sands.

Here, he's showing us the distinctive shape of the scaly skin. Too cool.

Science Writer Claire Eamer contemplates
a rather impressive ammonite specimen.

Here, we're being shown what is so groundbreaking about this mesosaurus
fossil. But shhh - I can't tell you what it is until theTyrrell
researchers publish their findings.

A walk through the warehouse was perhaps the most amazing and mindblowing part of the whole adventure. It reminded me of a stroll through IKEA, but instead of Billy Bookshelves, these racks held row after row of Triceratops heads.

The tour concluded with a scouting trip out into the Badlands to find some fossils of our own.

Can you spot the dinosaur bones sticking up from the ground in this picture?

The visit to the Tyrrell is one I'd recommend to anyone, especially if you have kids in tow. Try camping out in the museum, or going on a dig of your own through one of their comprehensive education programs.

I learned so much on this trip, I've turned it into two nonfiction book proposals, a proposal for an enhanced e-book series, and have even decided to use the museum and badlands as the setting for my sequel to Trouble in the Hills, my young adult adventure novel.

Who knows how a visit to Drumheller will inspire you?













Book Review: Jurassic Poop by Jacob Berkowitz

Title: Jurassic Poop
Author: Jacob Berkowitz
Publisher: Kids Can Press
ISBN: 9781553378600


Book Source: library

That's right.  It's an entire book about fossil feces - more formally known as coprolites.  And what a book it is.   As the jacket blurb says, "Funny and informative, Jurassic Poop is flush with amazing facts, stories, and activities."

The puns, they write themselves - and I'm pretty sure Berkowitz uses most of them.  His tone throughout is light and funny - I'd call it tongue-in-cheek but under the circumstances that's a pretty disgusting thought - and perfectly suited to his middle-grade target audience.

There's a lot more to this book than scat jokes, however; it's full of wide-ranging and totally fascinating information.  Berkowitz covers everything you never knew about fossil doo - its formation, its discovery, and the identification of its sources.  He then goes on to discuss some of the wealth of information that can be gained by studying it.  The book also contains profiles of scat scientists and several activities - including a recipe for scent-free coprolite crafts.

Still not quite convinced?  Jurassic Poop won the 2007 American Institute of Physics Children's Book Award.  And when I hear giggling in the 9-12 nonfiction section at the bookstore, it's usually a sign this book's getting browsed.

For more information on Jacob Berkowitz and his books, you can visit his website, or watch for his posts right here on Sci/Why!

---

Posted by Lindsey Carmichael.  For more of her children's book reviews, check out her blog, Ten Stories Up.

Dinosaur Huntress?

Posted by HELAINE BECKER

Sometimes life has a funny way of throwing odd coincidences at you. Carl Jung called them "synchronicities," and attributed them to the cosmic consciousness and Universal Oversoul (As a science writer, I tend to attribute them to the Law of Really Big Numbers, a feature of modern life that I examined in my book Are You Psychic?).

In May, I experienced one of these wonderful synchronicities. My adventure began at my local public library when a book on the "New Non-fiction" shelf leapt out at me. It's called Curiosity: A Love Story. With a title like that, and cover art showing cutely creepy prehistoric animals eating each other, there was no way this book was not coming home with me.

The author, Joan Thomas, is a Winnipegger. Her first novel, Reading by Lightning, won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book and Amazon Canada's First Novel Award. It was also chosen by the Globe and Mail as one of its Top 100 Books in the year it was published.

Curiosity tells the story of Mary Anning, a Victorian woman you know of thanks to a famous tongue twister: "She sells sea shells by the sea shore."

Mary Anning did indeed sell sea shells, but she also sold fossils. She combed the cliffs and beaches of Lyme Regis on England's south coast for the "snakestones" and other curiosities that turned up regularly there, the result of the the limestone cliffs routinely crumbling from the force of wind and water. Her curiosities were sold to scientists who were trying, for the first time, to piece together where these unexplained objects came from, and how life forms not found on Earth today could have been buried in cliffs and stone in a world that was believed to have remained unchanged since the Flood.

Mary Anning combing for Fossils

The novel tells the story of  the first paleontologists tentative steps toward knowledge from Mary's point of view. She was "just"  a peasant girl, with no education, but she had a keen mind and a far better understanding of the finds than of the men who purchased them from her.

Her story is riveting, and Thomas' skill as a writer transported me to those wet, windswept beaches that were Anning's haunts and home.

How strangely delightful, then, to unexpectedly find myself a mere two days later combing a windswept, rainy beach for fossils - without leaving Canada!

I'd finished reading Curiosity on Sunday. On Monday, I flew to Moncton, New Brunswick, to begin my tour for the Hackmatack Awards Authors in the Schools program. I'd be spending the next few days in rural Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, speaking to students about books and writing.

The historic lighthouse at Parrsboro,
one of the towns where I presented. It's
just down the coast from Joggins.

My host, Chantelle Taylor, is the Youth Services Librarian for the Cumberland County Library System. She arranged my visits, made sure I was fed and watered, and drove me back and forth across the county from school to school. On our second day together, we had some free time. I had just finished reading at the twee little library in River Hebert, when Chantelle announced we could pop over to Joggins to see the sights.

I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of Joggins. Chantelle told me it was a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and known for its signicant fossil finds, including the oldest reptile ever found.

I was surprised, to say the least. I consider myself to be somewhat knowledgeable about stuff like this. I'd dreamt of going to Drumheller for years, after all, and had just booked my air ticket to see the dinosaur bones there. Those were famous.

But Joggins???

Knock me over with a feather.

The cliffs at Joggins, on what seems to me to
be an uncharacteristically sunny day.
PhotoTravelgrove.com

Joggins is indeed a spectacular, and important, site. Cliffs rise straight up from the water's edge. And just like the cliffs in Lyme Regis, they are chock full (or should I say "chalk" full?) of fossils.

The oh-so significant oldest reptile fossil.

In fact, the fossils at Joggins are some of the oldest and best-preserved fossils anywhere dating from the Carboniferious Period. 

Even more significantly, the same scientists who studied Mary Anning's fossil curiosities practically wet themselves in excitement over the fossils from Joggins. Charles Darwin himself developed key ideas in his evolutionary theory after examining them.

A lovely, new museum sits atop the cliffs at Joggins. Attractive, well-designed and clearly labelled displays introduce the visitor to the Joggins world - both its prehistory and its modern history. (Carboniferous  = coal, and Joggins was until fairly recently, an active mining community. The museum was actually built on top of the old mine.)



After touring the museum, the main event: Chantelle and I headed out into the cold, driving rain and down the path to the beach to hunt for fossils.

I felt exactly like Mary Anning: cold, and wet, and blinded by rain, as I scanned the loose rocks of the beach for evidence of something marvelous.

Synchronicity indeed.

I knew that my single foray onto the beach would be unlikely to yield a fossil of the caliber of some of Mary Anning's finds. But I was determined to find something, anything, that could be called a fossil.

Here's the photo of what I found. I think that squiggly section on the right hand side is a "millipede" track. At least, it looks an awful lot like the ones showcased in the museum.

Can you see the fossily squiggle sitting a the 2:00 position in the rock?



I took this photo because the plaque describes
why Joggins is so important. But it also
has as it's headline the title of one of
my books, What's the Big Idea? :)









Seeing the real McCoy... er, McDino

I love really old animals. Really, really old animals! Not just dinosaurs, but ancient mammals and sea monsters and proto-birds and mysterious undersea critters that have left their imprint in ancient rocks... all of them. And I love thinking about how they and their worlds link up with us and our world.

In fact, I love that so much that I've written two books on the subject: Super Crocs and Monster Wings, and Spiked Scorpions and Walking Whales.

So, imagine my delight at visiting the T. rex Discovery Centre in Eastend, a small town in southwestern Saskatchewan.


Although it was named for Scotty, the Tyrannosaurus rex found nearby, the Discovery Centre is a treasure trove of an amazing range of fossils from the area, from giant sea creatures that swam in the great inland sea that once covered most of the Great Plains to the strange-looking mammals that evolved to fill niches left by the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Still, Scotty the T. rex is pretty cool. With more than 65 percent of her skeleton complete, she (probably she) is the most complete T. rex found in Canada so far. Scotty was discovered 20 years ago near Eastend. All her fossil bits are in the Royal Saskatchewan Museum's fossil research lab, which is housed in the Discovery Centre. There's something rather amazing about peering through a huge glass window to see a complete set of fossilized dinosaur vertebrae laid out in order on four large shelves. Not replicas. The real thing!

Coincidentally, in the year that Scotty was discovered, 1991, other scientists discovered the impact site of a huge meteor that struck Earth 65 million years ago and hastened the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as plenty of other animals. In fact, 75 percent of the species on earth became extinct after that impact.

The meteor left its mark around the world, in a layer of light-coloured clay and ash, often rich in the element iridium, which is more common in meteors than in Earth's crust. It's called the K-T Boundary because it marks the end of the geological time called the Cretaceous Period (it starts with a K in German) and the beginning of the Tertiary Period.

And there it was, too! Not just a diagram of rock layers or a photograph, but a chunk of rock from the Frenchman River Valley with the actual K-T Boundary layer running through it. Below that pale line was rock a dinosaur might have stepped on. Above it was rock that might once have carried the footprint of a mammal exploring its new, dinosaur-free world.

When you spend a lot of time reading about the ancient past, looking at pictures or replicas of fossils, and even writing about it, seeing the real thing right in front of you is a thrill.

Can you tell?

Claire Eamer