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Board
Corner
Gerry Naugle
The FMC Board would like to remind everyone of the upcoming Denver Mineral
Show on Sept 14th- 16th at the Denver Merchandise Mart at 58th Ave. and
I-25. This year’s show theme is Copper Minerals. Come and host at our club
table with the kids and adults if you can.
And, the Board would like to
invite all club members and their guests to the fall kick-off meeting at
the West Boulder Senior Center on Thursday, Sept. 20th. Meeting start time
is 7:10pm and Craig Hazelton will be presenting the main talk. (See below.)
Welcome back to our 2012-2013
fall and winter activities, capped as always, by our Holiday-Season Mineral
Show on Dec. 7th-9th.
****************
Fall Club Meetings and Trips
Gabi Accatino,
Co-Chairperson, Programs
Club
meeting, Sept. 20. Club member Craig
Hazelton will give us a “blog style tour” of some of the gem shows he has
been to, focusing on "gems and minerals, half about the rocks half
about the people".
Field
trip, Sept. 22. (Saturday) A return
trip to DIA with the CMS to collect fossil leaves and petrified wood from
the construction at the airport.
Contact Gabi Accatino, for more information and to sign up.
Club
meeting, Oct. 11. Gary Rowe, a USGS Geologist and the field trip
coordinator for CMS will talk about volcanoes and his research in Costa
Rica, Japan, and Tanzania. He
promises that his talk will be part Volcanos 101,
part science, and part travelogue, with lots of cool volcano pics!
****************
Jr. Geologists
Summer Activities
The
Jr. Geologists were quite active this summer. Here are some of the things they have
been doing.
Pawnee Grasslands Trip:
For our meeting
in August, the Jr. Geologists traveled to the Pawnee National Grasslands
east of Greeley to collect Cretaceous shell fossil. From the campground at the Grasslands, we
hiked on to private property to a site that dates at the end of the
Cretaceous Period when this part of Colorado was covered by a shallow
sea. The fossil shells found today
are from a sea shore environment from that time. Everyone found a number of different
types of fossils, plus some cone-in-cone specimens, to add to their
collection. We want to thank the
landowner for giving us permission to collect on his property.
Ian
Crittenden shows a specimen of coquina – a limestone composed of shells
cemented together
Some
of the fossil clams found on the trip
Wamsutter Turritella and
Stromatolites
Several of the Jr. Geologists attended
the June field trip to southwest Wyoming.
One of our stops was the famous location south of Wamsutter to collect turritella
agate and agatized stromatolites. In August, the Jr. Geologists met at
Terry O’Donnell’s house to cut some of their specimens, exposing the snails
in the turritella agate and the fossilized algae
structure in the stromatolites. We want to thank Terry and Tally
O’Donnell for helping the kids cut their specimens.
Terry
and Tally O’Donnell helping Teddy Reeves and his mother Cindy cut one of
the specimens he found at Wamsutter
One
of the cut turretella agate specimens found at Wamsutter this summer.
A
Wamsutter stromatolite
cut to show the fossilized algae layers in the specimen.
Jr. Geologists Case
for the Denver Show
As
we did last year, the Jr. Geologists will have a display at the Denver Gem
and Mineral Show, September 14-16th.
We would like all of the Jr. Geologists to pick 2 to 6 specimens
that you have found or lapidary projects you have completed to put in the
case. These could be rocks,
minerals, or fossils you found during one of our field trips, specimens you
found on your own, or one of your lapidary projects.
If
you have specimens for the case, please contact Dennis Gertenbach
to make arrangements for him to pick them up. He needs to have your specimens by
Sunday, September 9th. All specimens
will be returned to you after the show.
September
Meeting For
September, we will meet at the Denver Gem and Mineral Show on Saturday,
September 15th, at 2 pm. At the
show, we will see fabulous minerals and fossils, including our own Jr.
Geologists display case, and enjoy the kids’ activities. This is the second largest gem and
mineral show in the country, so you do not want to miss it.
October
Meeting Beginning
in October, the Jr. Geologists meeting will meet on the second Wednesday
each month at the Boulder Library Reynolds Branch, 3595 Table Mesa Drive in
Boulder. We will work on several of
the new badges this fall at the meetings.
The
Jr. Geologists program is open to all Flatirons Mineral Club families. Each month we learn more about geology,
plus earn badges for different earth science activities. For information about the Jr. Geologists
program, please contact Dennis
Gertenbach.
The
Jr. Geologists program is looking for adults to help with the monthly
activities. If you would enjoy
working with the kids, either for a special project or at their monthly
meeting, please contact Dennis.
****************
An
Elephant Never Forgets!
A
friendly reminder that your annual membership dues to the FMC are due on
October 1st, 2012. The dues are
still only $18 per individual (and) their immediate family. You can pay in two ways:
SEND
A CHECK MADE TO "Flatirons
Mineral Club" (or) “FMC“ P.O. Box 3331 Boulder, CO 80307
(or)
pay Gerry Naugle,
Treasurer (or) Kristi
Traynor, Membership Chair at any FMC monthly meeting. One of them is at or near the sign-in
table upon entering the room for the monthly meetings. Your receipt is your new annual 2012-13 FMC membership card.
You
can pay by CASH at these FMC meetings.
Please do not send cash to the Club P.O. Box by USPS mail. Remember you can receive electronic (or)
paper club newsletters containing the general meetings information, guided
club field trips information, annual show opportunities, silent auction
opportunities and an annual club summer picnic when you are a current
member of the FMC
The 2012-13 dues must be received by the club by Jan. 20th,
2013 in order to stay current with the member benefits.
****************
Get Your
Very Own Flatirons Mineral Club Baseball Cap
The
club now has Baseball caps in a variety of colors for sale. They sport the
newly revised FMC logo. Buy them at
any meeting. The member price is $10
each, while the non-member price is $15.
****************
Recent
Club Field Trips
Como
Bluff Chronicles - Wyoming
Work
on the eastern end of the Nail Quarry on June 9 turned up the tip of a
beautiful therapod tooth and a piece of mystery
bone. Dr. Karen Chin at CU helped us
clean the bone and guessed it to be the neural (top) spine of a sauropod vertebra.
At 11 inches long, it would have come from a very large
vertebra! (Human neural spines are
about an inch and a half long.) Our
mystery bone will next visit the Denver Museum for more cleaning and
examination.
On
July 13-15, club members again ventured up to Wyoming for more hard work
uncovering the Jurassic age.
On
June 16, club members visited the Collector’s Edge facilities in
Golden. Collector's Edge Minerals is
a worldwide mineral specimen mining and acquisition company. Steve Behling
gave us the tour and showed us the receiving and storage area, the cleaning
and preparation facilities, and the vault, which contains their most
exceptional specimens from around the world. Thank you, Steve, for an amazing tour!
A
beautiful plate of rhodochrosite and amethyst
from "Steve's Pocket" at the Sweet Home Mine in Colorado.
****************
Fossils
in the News
Dennis Gertenbach
Jurassic
Squid Ink Identical to Modern Cuttlefish Ink Two years ago, Phillip Wilby of the British Geological Survey found giant
cephalopod fossils in Wiltshire, England, that contained ink sacs. Cephalopods include modern squid,
cuttlefish, and octopuses, animals that use melanin-containing ink to help
escape predators. These
160-million-year-old fossil ink sacs still preserved the melanin pigment in
the ink, an extremely rare occurrence, as organic material is rarely
preserved in fossils this old. Wilby sent samples of the ink to researchers in the
United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and India to study. Using several analytical techniques,
these researchers found that the fossil ink pigment contained melanin that
is nearly identical in chemical structure as melanin found in the ink of
the modern-day cuttlefish Sepia officinalis,
common to the Mediterranean, North, and Baltic seas. Their findings show that the use of ink
to escape predators by cephalopods has not significantly changed since the
Jurassic Period.
An
ink sac from a 160-million-year-old cephalopod fossil contains the pigment
melanin (Credit: University of Virginia)
Feathered
Dinosaurs May Be More Common Than Previously Thought A new species of feathered dinosaur
discovered in southern Germany, Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, is changing paleontologists’ image of
predatory dinosaurs. S. albersdoerferi lived 150 million years ago and is the
first feathered dinosaur found that is not closely related to birds. Until this discovery, all of the
feathered predatory dinosaurs known so far are coelurosaurs,
which are close relatives of birds.
S. albersdoerferi is a megalosaur
therapod, not a coelurosaur,
and is the first instance in which feathers have been found on a dinosaur
that was not a direct ancestor of birds.
This juvenile specimen of S. albersdoerferi,
which was only about 28 inches in length, probably hunted insects and other
small prey, as evidenced by the slender, pointed teeth in the tip of the
jaws. Adult megalosaurs reached about 20 feet in
length, weighed more than a ton, and were active predators, probably
hunting other large dinosaurs.
Skeleton
of Sciurumimus albersdoerferi
showing fine feathers (Credit: H. Tischlinger/Jura
Museum Eichstatt)
Giant
Fossil Turtle Found in Colombia Paleontologist Carlos Jaramillo's
group at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and
colleagues at North Carolina State University and the Florida Museum of
Natural History discovered a new species of fossil turtle that lived 60
million years ago in what is now northwestern South America. With its total length of 5 feet, this
fossil turtle named Puentemys mushaisaensis
provides further evidence that after the extinction of the dinosaurs,
tropical reptiles grew much bigger than they are now. Fossils from Cerrejon, the area in which P. mushaisaensis
was found, is also the area that fossils of the world’s biggest snake, Titanoboa, were found.
The most peculiar feature of this new turtle is its circular shell,
about the size and shape of a big car tire.
Scientists speculate that this large size and shape prevented it
from being swallowed by other predators, including Titanoboa,
and may have aided in regulating its body temperature.
Artist’s
rendition of the large turtle Puentemys mushaisaensis (Credit: Liz Bradford)
Volcanic
Ash Fall Preserved Earth’s Earliest Animals A volcanic eruption around 579
million years ago buried some of the earliest-known animals in ash,
preserving them as fossils in rocks in Newfoundland. These fossils date back to before the
Cambrian Period, a time when the first multi-cellular animals
appeared. Over 100 fossils of what
are believed to be young rangeomorphs were found;
bizarre frond-shaped organisms that lived 580-550 million years ago. Although they superficially resemble
sea-pen corals, they are unlike any living creature. Where they fit in the tree of life is
unclear. The fossils from this
location are all 1 inch or less in length; however other rangeomorphs from neighboring areas can reach six feet
in length. These fossils are from
the very bottom of the fossil-bearing rocks, making these multi-cell
animals among the oldest in the geological record.
Juvenile
rangeomorph fossil Charnia,
measuring less than one inch in length. (Credit: Oxford University/Jack
Matthews)
****************
Denver Gem & Mineral Show
Judy Knoshaug, Show Secretary
The
Denver Gem & Mineral Show is coming soon! Remember the dates, September 14 – 16,
2012 at the Denver Merchandise Mart, I-25 and 58th Avenue. The theme is Copper and Copper
Minerals. This theme covers a wide
range of minerals with copper as one of the main components. For further information, see the mini
report for February 2012 or contact the Judging Chair, Larry Havens, at
303-757-6577 or lghavens@aol.com.
Copper minerals are usually very colorful so there are sure to be
many spectacular exhibits this year.
Of course, there are many spectacular exhibits every year!
As
most of you know, the Denver Show is a club show. That means it is planned, organized and
operated by volunteers from the eight local clubs. The eight local clubs make up the
Greater Denver Area Gem & Mineral Council, which is technically the
legal sponsor of the show. It takes
400 plus volunteers to operate the show, which is a lot of people donating
a lot of time and energy. Where
else can you enjoy and participate in such a wonderful event for the gem,
mineral and fossil hobbies. At the
show, you can marvel at the beautiful exhibits; enter an exhibit yourself; check out the
mineral specimens, gems, fossils, lapidary equipment, and other stuff for
sale in all price ranges by the dealers; view the fluorescent minerals;
attend lectures of your interest; talk to knowledgeable people about
mineral, gems, or fossils; and discover new ideas for exhibiting, new
techniques for faceting or lapidary art, or new methods of fossil
preparation. The opportunities are
almost endless.
We
hope you will be one of those 400 plus persons needed to put on the
show. There are many opportunities
there as well, some sitting jobs and some more active. There is show set up on Wednesday,
admissions, security, hospitality, schools, exhibits assistant, grab bag
and poster sales, judging clerks, volunteer check in, poster giveaway,
dealer check in, and show take down on Sunday. In addition, your club will presumably
have a club booth to attract show attendees to join your club. It would be wonderful if every club
member of all the eight clubs volunteered to help the show in some
way. If you have any questions
about volunteering, talk to your show representative. Each club has a representative who is on
the Show Committee and can answer your questions.
If
you enjoy the show, consider joining the Show Committee. Then you can help to plan the show. The Show Committee needs new people all
the time because some of us “old timers” are just that. We keep growing older. New faces are always welcome on the
committee. So please think about
joining. The committee meets every
month on the first Tuesday, except for the months of December, February,
and July, at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Talk to your club representative about
joining the committee. He or she
will be glad to have you. Don’t be
afraid to get involved.
****************
Dinosaur Die out Might Have Been Second of Two
Closely Timed Extinctions
ScienceDaily Magazine (Sep. 5, 2012)
The
most-studied mass extinction in Earth history happened 65 million years ago
and is widely thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs. New University of
Washington research indicates that a separate extinction came shortly
before that, triggered by volcanic eruptions that warmed the planet and
killed life on the ocean floor.
The
well-known second event is believed to have been triggered by an asteroid
at least 6 miles in diameter slamming into Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. But
new evidence shows that by the time of the asteroid impact, life on the
seafloor -- mostly species of clams and snails -- was already perishing
because of the effects of huge volcanic eruptions on the Deccan Plateau in
what is now India. "The
eruptions started 300,000 to 200,000 years before the impact, and they may
have lasted 100,000 years," said Thomas Tobin, a UW doctoral student
in Earth and space sciences.
The
eruptions would have filled the atmosphere with fine particles, called
aerosols, that initially cooled the planet but, more importantly, they also
would have spewed carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to produce
long-term warming that led to the first of the two mass extinctions.
"The aerosols are active on a year to 10-year time scale, while the
carbon dioxide has effects on a scale of hundreds to tens of thousands of
years," Tobin said.
During
the earlier extinction it was primarily life on the ocean floor that died,
in contrast to the later extinction triggered by the asteroid impact, which
appeared to kill many more free-swimming species. "The species in the first event are
extinct but the groups are all recognizable things you could find around on
a beach today," he said.
Tobin
is the lead author of a paper in the journal Palaeogeography,
Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology
that documents results of research conducted in a fossil-rich area on Seymour
Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula.
That
particular area has very thick sediment deposits and, for a given interval
of time, might contain 10 times more sediment as the well-known Hell Creek
Formation in Montana. That means scientists have much greater detail as
they try to determine what was happening at the time, Tobin said. The researchers took small surface core
samples from rocks and fossils in the Antarctic sediment and used a method
called magnetostratigraphy, employing known
changes over time in Earth's magnetic field to determine when the fossils
were deposited. The thicker sediment allowed dating to be done more
precisely.
"I
think the evidence we have from this location is indicative of two separate
events, and also indicates that warming took place," Tobin said. There
is no direct evidence yet that the first extinction event had any effect on
the second, but Tobin believes it is possible that surviving species from
the first event were compromised enough that they were unable to survive the
long-term environmental effects of the asteroid impact. "It seems improbable to me that they
are completely independent events," he said.
****************
18” ROCK SAW FOR SALE
USED
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REINFORCED WITH ALUMINUM
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SCREW
FEED OR GRAVITY FEED
18”
DIAMOND BLADE (LOTS OF DIAMOND LEFT)
WHEELED
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(New
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****************
Also For
Sale:
Raytech 10" saw, in factory box,
never used with deluxe feed mechanism. $1000. Compare to stores, or on-line.
UltraVibe-10, new
rock tumbler $150.
Compare to stores, or on-line. Both
located at a house in Boulder.
Contact: Rose,
at: 415-933-3177
****************
Hanging
Out at an Ancient Oasis
by Sid Perkins on 18 April 2012, 2:30 PM (From the AFS
Science Magazine, by the American Federation of Scientists, May 2012
issue.)
Grabbing chow. Analyses
of the fossils of ammonites, long-extinct relatives of today's squid and
octopi, unearthed in South Dakota suggest that some of the creatures
(artist's reconstruction shown) lived their entire lives at seafloor oases
nourished by methane-rich fluids.
Credit:
S. Thurston/AMNH
Beginning
400 million years ago, nautilus like creatures known as ammonites—which
sported dozens of tentacles and lived in spiral, conical, or helical
shells—roamed the open ocean in search of fish and other prey. At least that's
what paleontologists have long assumed. But a new study finds that some
members of this ancient group—relatives of octopi, squid, and
cuttlefish—were far more sedentary creatures, spending most of their lives
at spots where methane bubbled up from the sea floor.
Ammonites
were one of the most long-lived groups of prehistoric animals, only dying
out 65 million years ago, when they succumbed to the same mass extinction
that claimed the dinosaurs. Scientists have typically found their
fossils—shells that range from thumbnail-size to 2 meters across—in rocks
derived from sea-floor sediments that contain no bottom-dwelling life,
indicating that the creatures inhabited the open ocean and then sank to the
barren sea floor after they died.
But
new analyses of fossils unearthed in southwestern South Dakota dispel the
notion that all ammonites were nomadic. Researchers led by Neil Landman, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City, studied fossils embedded in a
13-meter-high, 20-meter-wide chunk of limestone that formed almost 75
million years ago, when South Dakota lay at the bottom of a shallow inland
sea. In addition to ammonites, they found fossils of other marine creatures
such as clams, sponges, corals, and fish. Measurements of the ratio of
carbon isotopes—types of atoms that have different numbers of neutrons in
their nucleus and, therefore, have different weights—in the limestone
suggest that the site was a spot where methane-rich fluids rose to the sea
floor from deep within Earth's crust. These "methane seeps"
served as sea-floor oases, with methane-consuming microbes at the base of
the food chain and creatures such as clams and marine snails either
feasting on the microbes or hosting their own methane-munching bugs that
allowed them to take advantage of the energy source directly.
These
creatures, and the predators that prey upon them, would have had
higher-than-normal proportions of carbon-13 isotopes in their tissues than
animals feeding on prey in ecosystems where the base of the food chain is
composed of plants and photosynthetic organisms.
Previous
studies suggest that there were hundreds if not thousands of such ancient
methane seeps in a swath of sea floor that stretched from what is now
eastern Montana to south-central Colorado, says Landman.
At the South Dakota site, he and his colleagues found fossils of juvenile
and adult ammonites, and they even unearthed ammonites that had shell
damage suggesting they'd been preyed upon and partially eaten. That's only
circumstantial evidence that the creatures spent their lives at these
sea-floor oases, he notes. But the team's detailed geochemical analyses of
the ammonite fossils, including a series of samples from one individual,
reveal that the creatures' shells contain much higher proportions of
carbon-13 than those in ammonites of the same age found elsewhere in the
region. That difference provides strong evidence that these ammonites spent
much, if not all, of their lives at the methane seep, the researchers
contend in a forthcoming issue of Geology. If the ammonites had been
consuming prey in a food chain that didn't ultimately derive its energy
from ancient methane—one based on photosynthetic organisms, for
instance—then the proportions of carbon-13 in the creatures' shells would
have been much higher than the team actually measured.
"This
is a really nice paper, and I like how the researchers made their
case," says Ruth Martin, a paleontologist at the University of Washington,
Seattle. The ancient methane seeps acted like modern-day reefs, she notes.
"There was a good supply of food, and this would have been a nice
place for the ammonites to hang out. ... It all makes sense."
Royal
Mapes, an invertebrate paleontologist at Ohio
University in Athens, agrees. "Undoubtedly, the ammonites were there
[at the seeps] to take advantage of an incredibly rich food source."
And perhaps it's no surprise that researchers haven't previously suggested
that ammonites and other marine predators were full-time inhabitants of
sea-floor oases, he notes, because oceanographers first discovered thriving
ecosystems based on chemosynthesis and not photosynthesis around
hydrothermal vents only 35 years ago, and similar ecosystems around deep-sea
methane seeps were discovered less than 30 years ago.
****************
Upcoming
Events
Wed.,
Sept. 12, CSM Geology Museum Annual Open House, Reception, and Silent
Auction held during the week of the Denver Gem and Mineral Show; 6 to 9
p.m. at the Colorado School of Mines
Geology Museum, 13th and Maple Streets, Golden. All are invited!
Sept
12-16, Colorado Mineral and Fossil Show, at the Ramada Plaza Hotel
(formerly the Holiday Inn), 4849 Bannock St, Denver (frontage road on west
side of I-25, north of I-70); free parking and admission, many mineral
dealers; see
http://www.mzexpos.com/colorado_fall.htm
Many of the dealers will be open as early as Sept. 8. This and
several other "satellite shows" take place during the week of the
Denver Gem and Mineral Show.
Sept.
8-16, Denver Coliseum Mineral Show; another "satellite" show of
dealers in "minerals, fossils, dinosaurs, gems, jewelry, gold,
meteorites"; free admission and parking; 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily; 4600 Humboldt
St., Denver CO 80216; from I-70, exit 275B at Brighton Blvd; outside tents
open Sept. 8-16, tents and Coliseum open Sept. 12-16; see http://coliseumshow.com/
Fri.-Sun.,
Sept. 14-16, Denver Gem and Mineral Show, Denver Merchandise Mart, I-25 at
58th Ave., Denver CO; featured theme will be Copper Minerals.. The
second-largest gem and mineral show in the U.S. Combined with the Colorado
Fossil Expo in the same building complex; a wholesale-only jewelry trade
show also takes place in another section of the complex. Dealers, museum displays, lectures, club
exhibits, and gold panning; public welcome (admission charge; adults $6,
Seniors/Teens $4, children under 13 free with an adult); free parking. See http://www.denvermineralshow.com/
Sept.
14-16, Colorado Fossil Expo; 50 dealers specializing in fossils,
meteorites, amber, petrified wood and related items; special
paleontological exhibits. Held in conjunction with the Denver Gem &
Mineral Show (single admission fee applies to both shows) at the Denver
Merchandise Mart Plaza Annex, 451 E. 58th Ave., Denver, CO 80216.
Wed.,
Sept. 26. The Geology of Colorado's Front Range, Elevations Credit Union, Diagonal
Branch, 2960 Diagonal Highway, Boulder, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. Staff from the
Geological Society of America (GSA), will discuss the geologic history and
landmarks of Colorado's Front Range. They will provide some basic
background knowledge to put things into context, give a general overview of
how the current landscape was shaped through geologic time, present rock
samples from the region, describe details about specific sites of geologic
interest, and offer tips on how to explore the Front Range's geology on
your own. Learn more about this broad, unifying scientific society
(headquartered in Boulder) at: www.geosociety.org.
Sat.,
Oct. 13, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m., last Dinosaur Discovery Day of the year at
Dinosaur Ridge, Morrison CO.
Featuring Girl Scout ‘Rocks and Roles’ activity day. See
www.dinoridge.org for more info.
****************
On the Web:
An interesting article about the discovery, in a secret location, of
fossil dinosaur tracks on the NASA Goddard Space Flight campus in
Greenbelt, Maryland: http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-finds-spiny-dinosaur-prints-own-backyard-164434315.html.
****************
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Updated 10/29/12
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