500th Post

This morning Karen, Kris, and I joined 23 other judges at a science fair at Katie's elementary school for grades 3-5 (and a few earlier grade posters). Some of the posters were in Spanish (of which I know a little), but the students spoke English and they had lots of pictures, so that was fun. Some posters appeared to have students editing their starting prediction to fit their conclusion. After that we ate lunch with Katie in her Kindergarten class. This evening Karen and Kris enjoyed a free opera (Lucia di Lammermoor - a Romeo and Juliet type story) and Katie and I walked to the nearby Sonic and ate outside (weather has returned to mild and dry).

I don't have any pictures of all this, but I wanted to show you a couple of fossil pictures for this story. Back in the early fall I found a fossil in a cliff wall (like the Police song that goes "There's a fossil that's trapped in a high cliff wall...") that looked a lot like bone material. I brought it to the Texas Memorial Museum, and it was identified (by a student?) as a clam-like creature called a rudist. Reasonable, but for some reason I did not quite buy that and went back and extracted a larger piece of the fossil. I brought that to a couple of rock shows in the fall and people there thought it was bone, so I made contact with someone else at the museum. She tentatively identified it as a reptile bone (and gently reminded me that vertebrate fossils found on public land in Texas belong to the state) and recommended that I contact the University of Texas-Vertebrate Paleontology Lab. So in December, Karen, Kris, and I visited the VPL to show the piece and get a tour of the facility - it was pretty cool. Our contact there tentatively identified it as a mosasaur bone and visited the location with Kris and I to see the rest of the bone in the wall. I gave him most of the big fragments and kept the open information policy because 1) that is the legal thing to do, 2) I really do not feel I could easily extract the remaining bone piece (it's in not-soft matrix in a vertical wall), and 3) him having the bone might help provide an ID. He emailed me a couple days ago, he thinks that it is a mosasaur tail vertebra. There are no immediate plans to go after the rest of it, but he plans to keep an eye on it (we are keeping the location secret) to see if further erosion yields anything. This is probably where the story will end. It was a thrill to find even a small piece of a vertebrate reptile fossil from the Cretaceous (and I have been driving my family a little nuts about it). Since people have named some of their finds (like "Sue" the T-rex in Chicago) I'm calling this one "Kristine", since she was the one that first started exploring that particular spot. By the way, in case you are wondering, the mosasaurs were technically not dinosaurs, but these reptiles were one of the top ocean predators of the late Cretaceous and could get pretty huge. Imagine something like the basilisk in Harry Potter 2 with flippers. Mosasaurs also played a significant role in the history of the science of paleontology itself (I learned that from the IMAX movie I saw in Houston last month called "Sea Rex: Journey to a Prehistoric World"). Finding big sea reptile fossils in the Austin area is not common, but not unheard of. In one of the pictures I am standing next to the Onion Creek mosasaur (discovered in the 1930s) at the Texas Memorial Museum (the museum also has the Shoal Creek plesiosaur). This particular location has been good in other ways, too. We have found part of a sizable ammonite (like an octopus with a curly shell), a Ptychodus (extinct shellfish-eating shark) tooth, and a 13-inch Inoceramus (large clam) fragment all within ten feet of the bone.