You may have heard that D.C. got some snow this weekend. (It's true.) We went for a walk this morning to check out what the snowed-in city looked like. Here are a few photos...





This is fun:


K Street, home of the lobbyists:


Group of robins hanging out at National Geographic HQ:


The White House gets whiter:


A magnolia tree in Jackson Square, not doing so well:

(Magnolias seem particularly susceptible to losing limbs via heavy snow...)

Photogenic trees:




Washington Monument:


Up-side-down Diplocraterion? Or just where someone sat in the snow?


This trace fossil is more obvious; Bicyclus, clearly:


The National Mall (Smithsonian's Natural History Museum at left, Capitol Building at right):


Doppelganger week for the Capitol:


Cold Triceratops:


Snow decorates the trees in front of the FBI building:


Pennsylvania Avenue:


Callan checks on the snow depth:


Guess this roof isn't very well insulated...


Some structures... Here's a set of two normal faults in a snow stratum atop a hedge:


(Glove for scale, of course.) Here's a different angle on these extensional structures:


(Because GMU classes were canceled on Friday, I assigned my structural geology students to make some structures in the snow -- like Kim's example, perhaps, or perhaps like this hedge, but really limited only by their own imaginations...)

Here's a different one:

That's a sheet of snow being driven downward by gravity, sliding over a roof (fault-like) but then arching up at the tip (this would look 'antiform' if it were rotated 90 degrees...). Kind of like a compressional antiform transitioning into a thrust fault, a common 'structural ingredient' in fold and thrust belts the world over.

Some more normal faults, including en echelon arrays like we saw last September in the volcanic tableland north of Bishop, California... These are viewed from the bottom -- they are forming in snow atop the glass roof of the pagoda-thingy that covers the Columbia Heights metro escalators. Notice too the color difference (due to more or less snow) from the peak of the pagoda (where the faults are -- an area of "crustal" thinning) to the bottom (where the snow is thickest).


Finally, if you haven't already seen it, check out this time-lapse image of the snow accumulating! And here's one from Greg Willis, who has shared videos on this blog before... Enjoy!

Stay warm out there, everyone...

Labels: dc, dinosaurs, fossils, humor, smithsonian, snow, structure

Labels: devonian, fossils, oklahoma, psw, smithsonian

Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2009
7:00 p.m., in the Cooper Room, National Museum of Natural History
10th St. & Constitution Ave.
Non-Smithsonian visitors will be escorted
to the Cooper Room at 6:30 and 6:55 p.m.
Meet in the Constitution Avenue lobby at 5:00 p.m. to join us for dinner at 'Elephant and Castle.' Latecomers can meet directly at the restaurant at the NW corner of 12th & Penn. Ave., NW

About the speaker and the talk: Brian Huber has been on several ODP cruises, has served as a member of several international groups involved with foraminifera and with Cretaceous stratigraphy, and has served a term as President of the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research. Huber's work is a mix of micropaleontology and geochemistry. The Aptian/Albian boundary is a stage boundary about 112 million years ago in the later part of the Early Cretaceous. Several unusual geochemical changes occurred at this boundary and oceanographic and climate conditions were very different than in the modern world, making understanding events at this time one of the great puzzles of paleontology. Huber's work includes data from Ocean Drilling Program cores that provide exceptionally detailed data.

Labels: fossils, meetings, protista, psw, smithsonian

Tom Simkin Memorial

18:00-20:00, Thursday 17 December at Moscone Center South, Room Esplanade 302
(Not at the Marriott Marquis as listed in the AGU program)

A reception held for friends and colleagues to celebrate the life and contributions of Tom Simkin (1933-2009). Tom Simkin's distinguished career in volcanology at the Smithsonian spanned more than four decades. He was a pioneer in the investigation of volcanism on a global scale, and was the founder and director of the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program (GVP) until 1995. The twin pillars of the GVP lay in both documenting current volcanic activity and unrest and in developing a database of volcanoes and their eruptions during the past 10,000 years. He also led efforts resulting in three editions of the popular map of the Earth, This Dynamic Planet, in collaboration with colleagues from the USGS and the Naval Research Lab. The latest edition(2006) can also be found online.

Contact Paul Kimberly for questions regarding the reception (kimberlyp@si.edu). Tom's wife, Sharon, will attend the reception and be in San Francisco the week of AGU.

Labels: agu, california, geologists, meetings, smithsonian, volcano

PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON

Maryland in the Miocene: Paleoenvironmental History of the Calvert Cliffs
Susan Kidwell, Williams Rainey Harper Professor of Geology
Department of Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago

Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2009
7:00 p.m., in the Cooper Room, National Museum of Natural History (10th St. and Constitution Ave. in NW Washington, DC)

Meet in the Constitution Avenue lobby at 5:00 p.m. if you wish to join the PSW members for dinner at the "Elephant and Castle," NW corner of 12th & Penna. Ave., NW

Non-Smithsonian visitors will be escorted to the Cooper Room at 6:30 and 6:55 p.m.

Labels: dc, fossils, maryland, meetings, miocene, psw, smithsonian

This is another photo from Saturday's hike. Unakite is rumored to be the 'state rock' of Virginia, though it's not in the state code. Regardless of its official status, it sure is a distinctive sight: An epidotized granitoid, unakite is identified by the distinctive pairing of pistachio-green epidote and pink potassium feldspar. There's some grey/purple quartz there too. In the mid-Atlantic states, it's only found in the Blue Ridge geologic province. Here, on the trail below Dark Hollow Falls in Shenandoah National Park, my friends and I encountered this lovely boulder of unakite bearing a vein of milky quartz.

The original granitoid was Grenvillian in age, about 1.1 billion years old. Presumably the metamorphism took place during Alleghanian mountain-building, between 300-250 million years ago. Unakite has been quarried in Virginia for use as a building stone, and can be seen as tiles on the first terrace of the steps leading from the National Mall up to the southern doors of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

Labels: blue ridge, dc, igneous, metamorphism, minerals, museums, smithsonian, virginia

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Department of Mineral Sciences invites the museum community to a memorial service commemorating the life contributions of Tom Simkin, the founding director of the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program. Simkin also served as president of the Geological Society of Washington. A memorial program will be held at Baird Auditorium on Tuesday, September 8 at 10:30 AM, followed by a reception in the Executive Conference Room. We welcome your attendance. Please send your RSVP (yes only) to Sally Kuhn Sennert (KUHNS@si.edu) by 1 September to help us make catering estimates for the reception.

Labels: gsw, museums, smithsonian, volcano

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History is looking for a creative individual to work on contract in the capacity of Producer/Writer for a new Human Evolution website. In this capacity, the individual will work with the Museum's Human Evolution Web team, and coordinate with the Web Development Contractor to bring creative solutions to presenting the human evolution story, shaping, editing, and writing multimedia content. We are looking for someone with experience writing science stories, producing multimedia, and developing content for museums. For more information, contact Robert Costello, costellor@si.edu.

Labels: anthropology, evolution, jobs, museums, smithsonian

Here's a nice fold I saw the other day at the Smithsonian:

Labels: museums, smithsonian, structure

I saw Ray Stanford, an enthusiastic amateur paleontologist, speak last month at a meeting of the Paleontological Society of Washington.

It was my first PSW meeting, and I got a warm welcome from PSW president and University of Maryland paleontologist Tom Holtz, who gave a specific shout-out to NOVA Geoblog, encouraging the ~30 attendees to check it out. (If you're arriving as a consequnce of that endorsement, welcome!) Four of my Honors students joined me for the talk. Just getting to go behind the scenes at the Smithsonian is a treat in itself. From the Easter Island moai in the Constitution Avenue lobby of the museum, we were escorted through labyrinthine passageways to the Cooper Room. Our route brought us past immense fossil collections, cossetted away in row after row of cabinets. It was enticing, and made me resolve to arrange a special tour there sometime for the Honors students.

The point of the talk was Stanford's immense collection of fossil dinosaur tracks (and at least one apparent mammal track which is quite large: raccoon-sized at least, with apparent dinosaur skin impressions right next to it). It used to be thought that Maryland only had Triassic/Jurassic fossil tracks, from the Newark Supergroup rift valleys that opened up during the breakup of Pangea / opening of the Atlantic Ocean. Stanford has made a real scientific breakthrough by demonstrating that there are early Cretaceous-aged tracks in the area too.

None of his Cretaceous-aged tracks are collected in situ. Instead, he finds them all as "float" (weathered-out loose blocks) in streams draining exposures of (what I infer to be) the Patuxent Formation. (He didn't specifically mention source formations that I heard during the talk.)

He's found a ton of stuff! Actually,if I'm being literal, he's found tonS of stuff! And he stores it all in his living room! He recently had the foundations of his house reinforced because he has so much STUFF. Hundreds of tracks, and other fossils, too. Whoa! This guy does not play by the same rules as most folks.

There were a lot of coprolites mentioned, including:

• a 98-pound coprolite (!)
• a coprolite with a dinosaur footprint in it
• a dinosaur footprint with a coprolite in it

He also shared what he claimed were skin textures preserved in tracks. Some were self-evident, and I readily accepted them as valid. However, others weren't visible to the naked eye, and he only "demonstrated" them with Photoshopped images wherein the contrast dial was turned up to 11 -- I think this "technique" generated patterns that resembled skin impressions, but when I looked at the fossil itself, they were nowhere to be seen. I am dubious about this particular claim.

The talk gave me lots to think about, but not so much about dinosaur lifestyles or anatomy so much as the role of amateurs in science. Here's a guy with boundless enthusiasm, and he's finding stuff that the books literally said didn't exist. His efforts have resulting in expanding Maryland's Mesozoic paleontological record into the Cretaceous, and he's found all sorts of stuff that's super-duper interesting, like that mammal track.

Stanford was profiled last year in Geotimes magazine, before it switched its name to EARTH. Discovery News also ran a story about his findings. Interestingly, when Googling his name for this blog post, I also came across some other wacky stuff he's involved in, including UFO's. This definitely jibes with the lack of scientific rigor that I perceived in his presentation. (Quote from the interviewer: "In the 1970s, Stanford was the moving force behind the Association for the Understanding of Man (AUM) and Project Starlight. The former an attempt to decipher the UFO enigma by psychic means, the latter using advanced scientific instruments.")

So, having learned this, what do I make of his paleontological data? The best I can come up with is to trust my own eyes and view his claims open-mindedly but with the traditional scientific filter of skepticism. I accept the coprolite data; I found it self-evidently convincing. The skin-texture data? Not so much. The UFO stuff? Don't get me started...

Labels: coastal plain, cretaceous, culpeper basin, fossils, maryland, meetings, mesozoic, museums, psw, science and society, smithsonian

PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON

Confessions of a Dinosaur Hunter
by Richard Thompson
American Institute of Physics / AAAS Congressional Science Fellow

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 7:00 p.m., in the Cooper Room, National Museum of Natural History 10th St. & Constitution Ave.

Meet in the Constitution Avenue lobby at 5p.m. if you wish to join us for dinner, at the "Elephant and Castle," NW corner of 12th & Penna. Ave., NW

Non-Smithsonian visitors will be escorted to the Cooper Room at 6:30 and 6:55 p.m.

Last Meeting of the Season: See you in September!

Labels: dinosaurs, fossils, meetings, psw, smithsonian

PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON

Maryland's Lower Cretaceous Vertebrate Tracks and Trackways
by Ray Stanford, Maryland Track Project

Wednesday, April 15, 2009
7:00 p.m., in the Cooper Room, National Museum of Natural History
10th St. & Constitution Ave. Meet in the Constitution Avenue lobby at 5:00 p.m. if you wish to join us for dinner, at the Elephant and Castle, NW corner of 12th & Penna. Ave., NW

Non-Smithsonian visitors will be escorted
to the Cooper Room at 6:30 and 6:55 p.m.
Remaining Date for 2008-2009 Season: May 20

Labels: cretaceous, fossils, maryland, psw, smithsonian

I'm sure I won't be the only one to be writing about this today, but here's a couple of links to news items about Liberty University's "Advanced Creation Studies" students touring the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

NBC (snarky!)
Washington Post (with photos)

Labels: evolution, museums, news, smithsonian, teaching

The National Academies' Ocean Studies Board would like to announce that Dr. Paul G. Falkowski, Board of Governors' Professor at Rutgers University, will be the speaker for the tenth annual Roger Revelle Commemorative Lecture, scheduled for Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:30pm. It will be held in the Baird Auditorium in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (10th Street and Constitution Avenue). Dr. Falkowski's talk is entitled:


The ocean has been a feature of Earth's surface for at least 4 of the past 4.5 billion years, and has provided the primary environment for the evolution of microbes that drive the biogeochemical cycles on Earth. Over this long period of time, the ocean has witnessed extreme changes, ranging from complete coverage with ice to extensive periods when there was no ice at all; periods of extraordinary extinction of animal life, to periods of dramatic evolutionary radiation of animals. Throughout all of Earth's history, the ocean has served as the primary backbone of life on the planet; and the core metabolic processes have been successfully transferred across vast stretches of geological time. Humans, in contrast, evolved only about 200,000 years ago, and in that short period of time have come to successfully outcompete and plunder many of Earth's living resources. Over the past 100 years, in particular, we have increasingly altered the trophic structure of the ocean as well as its physical circulation and chemical properties. While human impacts will surely alter ecosystem functions the core metabolism of the ocean will go on. Rather, ironically, humans are the fragile species that will lose capabilities of using the ocean as a source of food and novel molecules. Our future is intimately tied to that of the ocean. We have to begin viewing the oceans as a key component of the Earth system; one that we cannot live without.

This event is free and open to the public. For planning purposes, please complete this brief registration form. You are encouraged to post the event flyer or to forward it to your colleagues. For more information, contact Pamela Lewis.

Please visit Roger Revelle Lecture Series for information on Roger Revelle and on previous lectures.

Labels: dc, meetings, oceans, smithsonian

PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON

Institutional Memories: The Paleo Art of National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution
by Angela Botzer (National Geographic) and Mary Parrish (Scientific Illustrator, Dept. of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution)

Paleo art has been an important part of the dissemination of the science of paleontology for two important Washington, DC institutions and their audiences for more than 150 years. The presenters will detail fascinating histories of paleo art via the material housed in the collections of their respective organizations.

Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009
7:00 p.m., in the Cooper Room, National Museum of Natural History
10th St. & Constitution Ave. Meet in the Constitution Avenue lobby at 5:00 p.m. if you wish to join some fun paleontologists for dinner, at the "Elephant and Castle," NW corner of 12th & Penna. Ave., NW. Non-Smithsonian visitors will be escorted to the Cooper Room at 6:30 and 6:55 p.m.

Remaining Dates for 2008-2009 Season: March 18, April 15, May 13

Labels: art, dc, fossils, meetings, psw, smithsonian

As noted everywhere, next Thursday is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. We've got fun plans at NOVA (and you're invited), but you might also opt for this symposium at the National Museum of Natural History downtown:

Thursday, February 12, 2009
Darwin Anniversary Symposium
Baird Auditorium, 12:00 noon to 3:00 pm

February 12, 2009 marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th year since the publication of his influential work, On the Origin of Species. To recognize Darwin's scientific accomplishments, including his observations on plant and animal life, the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, in conjunction with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, offers a day of discussions with distinguished panelists that will focus on a variety of topics from historical perspectives of Darwin to evolution and medicine.

Labels: evolution, meetings, smithsonian

PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON

Climatic Cooling and Body Size Evolution in Deep-sea Ostracodes
by Gene Hunt
Curator of Ostracoda, Department of Paleobiology
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

7:00 p.m., in the Cooper Room, National Museum of Natural History
10th St. & Constitution Ave.
Meet in the Constitution Avenue lobby at 5:00 p.m. if you wish to join dinner at the "Elephant and Castle," NW corner of 12th & Penna. Ave., NW

Non-Smithsonian visitors will be escorted
to the Cooper Room at 6:30 and 6:55 p.m.

Labels: meetings, psw, smithsonian

This weekend, I walked down to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History to check out their new Sant Ocean Hall (previous mentions on this blog).

The new exhibit hall has been under construction for a long time, and opened to the public the previous weekend. I've got a few photos here to share some of what I saw, but the museum also maintains their own Flickr page, which has additional (and better) photographs.

It's pretty cool. There are suspended specimens of both giant squid and also this coelacanth (with "pup" at upper right):


The exhibit has a lot of cool stuff having to deal with the geological aspects of oceanography, too, like this interactive exhibit about drill cores and how geologists interpret sediment. It would make an ideal visit for Historical Geology students:


The thing that caught my eye at first was a series of skeletons showing the evolution of whales over time, and in particular the shrinkage and eventual absence of their hind limbs and hips. I failed to note the name of the first one (falsely thinking I could look it up online!), but the more distant two specimens are Dorudon and Basilosaurus:


And they've got a nice C. megalodon jaw reconstruction holding lots of authentic teeth:


There are lots of smaller fossils, too. I was really impressed by the substantial portion of the hall which was given over to ancient oceans, as preserved in the sedimentary record. Here's a case showing some stunning fossils, including a MASSIVE asaphid trilobite and the best receptaculid ("sunflower coral") that I've ever seen:


A lot of trilobites are on display, most donated by Bob Hazen, of the Carnegie Institution and George Mason University. Here's a lovely Olenellus from Pennsylvania:


Also, you'll find Dunkleosteus, mosasaurs, and this Placinticeras ammonite with mosasaur bite marks running across it.


Here's a rudist clam, one of a half-dozen diverse and chunky specimens on display:


Lastly, I'll show a photo that's part of their display on the Burgess Shale. They include some imagery from Walcott's journal documenting actual fossil specimens that are displayed right along with it. Pretty cool -- a sort of window onto historical paleontological field work.


I also wanted to mention a really neat display called "Science on a Sphere," where a suspended sphere about six feet across gets imagery projected on it from the inside, accompanying narration that explains phenomena like plate tectonics, El Nino, the thermohaline "conveyor belt," and so forth. This YouTube video (not mine) gives a small taste of the Sphere as it explains surface currents using rubber duckies:



All told, it's a great exhibit, and you should check it out next time you're in DC.

Labels: fish, fossils, museums, oceans, smithsonian

Joel Achenbach reports in today's Washington Post about the Smithsonian Institution's newest addition: the Sant Ocean Hall, which opened this weekend at the National Museum of Natural History. I plan to go check it out myself this week, but until I get the chance to report, consider Mr. Achenbach's words.

Labels: dc, museums, oceans, smithsonian

Labels: fossils, mammals, meetings, oceans, psw, smithsonian

The Smithsonian's department of paleobiology has a webpage devoted to displaying some art that was used in some old scientific papers on fossils. There's a beautiful variety of images there, like this frontal view of a Triceratops skull that was used to prepare a lithograph, which then appeared in a paper by legendary paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh (archnemesis of Edward Drinker Cope). Check out the full variety of art here.

Labels: art, fossils, smithsonian, websites