SOMETIMES there are remarkable similarities between fossils, revealing
relationships among long-vanished beasts that have left only their bones behind.
Occasionally, those similarities can reveal even more.
While working at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science,
palaeontologist Jerry Harris was researching a paper on the ecology of
the famous feathered dinosaurs of
China’s Liaoning Province. He spotted a paper describing Hyphalosaurus, a
74-centimetre-long aquatic reptile from the province, in the well-circulated
journal Vertebrata PalAsiatica, and noted it for his project.
Later, when looking through the library of a colleague, he came across a
reprint of a paper published in a much more obscure Chinese journal. It caught
his eye because it had Liaoning in the title, so he began flipping through
it.
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“I came to the long figure of the specimen and recognised it,” Harris
recalls. He then sat down with the other paper, and found the two photos were
mirror images of each other. The bones in one stood proud of the rock surface,
while the other showed depressed casts of the same bones. Both showed a tiny
fish in the same position near the reptile’s mouth.
Later, he and Josh Smith of the University of Pennsylvania traced the same
pattern of cracks in both photos. Fossils are discovered when a rock is split in
two to reveal bones in one half and impressions in the other, and it seems the
Chinese farmers who uncover most of the Liaoning fossils have realised they can
earn more money by selling the two halves to different buyers.
In this case, they sold the two halves of the Hyphalosaurus fossil to two
different museums in Beijing without telling them about the duplication. So
scientists describing the two discoveries had no idea that they were describing
the same thing.
For the whole story see Smith and Harris’s report in Journal of Vertebrate
Paleontology (vol 21, p 389).
AMAZING what those clever people at NASA can do. The Associated Press report
on the Genesis mission published on Yahoo! News tells us: “The
$259 million Genesis mission will be the first attempt by NASA to return
extraterrestrial samples since the Apollo Moon landings. The spacecraft will
travel to an imaginary point 1 million miles from Earth, where it will orbit for
21 to 22 years and collect atoms of the Sun hurtling by as part of the solar
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GOOD news for endangered species, bad news for Hulk Hogan. USA Today reports
that the World Wildlife Fund has won a court judgment against the World
Wrestling Federation over the use of the initials WWF.
Feedback is a little sorry they didn’t contemplate a merger. The idea is
appealing: “WWF, the environmental pressure group with real muscle” . . .
READER Phil Hindell’s computer has a penchant for throwing down ontological
gauntlets. He was trying to open a document called “Behavioural and social
science research” when his PC responded with the words: “Science does not exist.
Do you wish to create it?”
SCHOOLKIDS will be jumping up and down all over Britain in two weeks’ time.
The Giant Jump, which launches Britain’s Science Year, will take place on 7
September at 11 am and go straight into The Guinness Book of Records as “the
greatest simultaneous jump in history”.
Everyone taking part will jump for one minute, and the results will be
monitored on seismometers and sensing equipment. Although this is the largest
jump that has been attempted, it will not be the first time that people jumping
up and down have caused the ground to shake. Alice Walker, a seismologist at the
British Geological Survey, recalls: “In November 1995, Londoners contacted
Scotland Yard claiming they had experienced an earthquake tremor. Investigations
revealed that 20,000 rock fans had been jumping up and down to Oasis in Earl’s
Court, and tremors were being reported from up to one mile away. It will be
interesting to see if hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions of school
students can beat Oasis.”
Science Year, which runs from September 2001 to August 2002, aims to raise
awareness of science among young people aged 10 to 19 years. See
www.scienceyear.com to find out more. If any readers further afield have
seismological equipment, let us know if the tremors caused by the British jump
travel round the world.
THE SPRING issue of Jamba Whirl, the quarterly newsletter from the
US-wide Jamba Juice chain, features an article entitled “The grass is always
greener” regarding the benefits of wheatgrass. It tells us: “In his book,
Wheatgrass: Nature’s finest medicine, author Steve Meyerowitz explains
wheatgrass’s life and energy-giving properties this way: ‘Inside the juice are
photons, protons and electrons. Our living cells reach out for these charged
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WE ASSUME that not many clubbers and ravers received the recent press release
sent out by the Queensland state government about “Enabling Queensland”, the new
training body for the state’s information technology and telecommunications
sector. Those that did will have been considerably surprised by the headline:
“New IT&T Organisation Promises ‘E for Everyone’.”
Cool!
IF YOU want to download RipEditBurn MP3 editing software, the RipEditBurn
website asks you: “Please choose your nearest download location.” It then offers
you three locations to choose from. These are: “USA”, “USA” and “USA”.
FINALLY, student Sharon Butt spotted this on a noticeboard near a
photocopying room in the electrical engineering building at the University of
New South Wales, Sydney: “Please do not remove Room 12GA. Thank you.”
She was happy to comply.
THE SMALL PRINT of the British TV Licence very reasonably advises licensees:
“your TV Licence does not guarantee a good picture”