There are to date at least 21 different types of dinosaurs that are known to have had feathers. Even Velociraptor, a well-established dinosaur, appears to have had a feather coating, as a recently discovered specimen shows that it had the bumps on one of its forearm bones called “quill nodes” that indicate where feathers attach in modern birds.
The pair of fighting dinosaurs tumbled across the sidewalk in front of me, bringing me to an abrupt halt. Screeching, flipping tail over talon, grasping at each other with their sharp, three-toed hind feet and stabbing at each other with their mouths, they didn’t even pause when they rolled over a vertical drop twice their own body length.
The next regular meeting of the BPS is Monday, July 6, 2009, 7-9 pm at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. Leisa Whitlow will present a lecture titled "Fossils and the American Indian".
Free parking, enter the McWane parking deck from 2nd Ave. NORTH and proceed to yellow level "C". Enter door marked "Special Events" and turn left to the large auditorium.
On 11 April, BPS visited a quarry in Morgan county. After signing in and filling out all the release forms we were escorted to the dig site. The quarry contains limestone, and the fossils found were primarily from the Mississ
Old hands as well as new joined up early on Saturday morning for a trip to some great Cretaceous gully sites in West Alabama. Dr. John Hall and Dr.
The next regular meeting of the BPS is Monday, June 1, 2009, 7-9 pm at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. The speaker will be Dr. Fred Andrus. His title for the lecture is "Sclerochronology: Fossil records of ecology, climate, and environment". He is an assistant professor in the department of geological sciences in Tuscaloosa.
Dr. Andrus research interests:
Check out the Google Search site for today, May 20, 2009 - In honor of the finding of the Missing Link to humans, published in numerous places on the web, Google has honored paleontology with a special banner on their search page. For more details of this fossil find, see this research article titled "Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology" published in PLoS ONE.
Well, sometimes things happen unexpectedly. A call on Monday to the landowner to schedule a field trip for March. Well, actually he said, the site is ready to be reclaimed. Next week. Can you come this Saturday? Well .
The next regular meeting of the BPS is Monday, May 4, 2009, 7-9 pm at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. The speaker will be James Lamb, Paleontologist at McWane Science Center. His lecture tonight will be "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg: The Fossil History of Birds".
Free parking, enter the McWane parking deck from 2nd Ave. NORTH and proceed to yellow level "C". Enter door marked "Special Events" and turn left to the large auditorium.
Sunday was spent hiking in the Cane Creek Canyon Preserve. Pictures are below.
Photos courtesy Nancy Lea and Vicki Lais.
