Nanotyrannus forever in combat

An artist's rendition.

"A Fossil Shows Dinosaurs Permanently Locked In A Fight"

by

Sarah Jacoby

October 31st, 2013

Popular Science

This month, two fossilized dinosaurs, locked in eternal battle, will be auctioned off at Bonhams in New York City. Experts expect them to fetch one of the highest ever prices for a fossil, up to $9 million. The pair’s prehistoric fight was intense. The carnivore, called a Nanotyrannus, sports a cracked skull, and 26 of its teeth are lodged in the body of an herbivorous Triceratops-like dino. But the fossil’s significance goes beyond the action; the find, predicted to be more than 90 percent complete, could yield definitive evidence about whether the Nanotyrannus is actually a new type of dinosaur or just a young T. rex—evidence that other fragmented fossils can’t provide. Discovered in 2006 on private land in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, the cretaceous-era duo is priced too high for any museum to purchase outright, which is why it’s headed to the block.

Nanotyrannus [Wikipedia]

Squirreled away...Darwin's fossils

"U.K. scientists find 'lost' Darwin fossils"

January 17th, 2012

USA TODAY

British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.

Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.

Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labeled 'C. Darwin Esq."

"It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the paleontologist said, adding he soon realized it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen.

He described the feeling of seeing that famous signature as "a heart in your mouth situation," saying he wondering "Goodness, what have I discovered!"

Falcon-Lang's find was a collection of 314 slides of specimens collected by Darwin and other members of his inner circle, including John Hooker— a botanist and dear friend of Darwin — and the Rev. John Henslow, Darwin's mentor at Cambridge, whose daughter later married Hooker.

The first slide pulled out of the dusty corner at the British Geological Survey turned out to be one of the specimens collected by Darwin during his famous expedition on the HMS Beagle, which changed the young Cambridge graduate's career and laid the foundation for his subsequent work on evolution.

Falcon-Lang said the unearthed fossils — lost for 165 years — show there is more to learn from a period of history scientists thought they knew well.

"To find a treasure trove of lost Darwin specimens from the Beagle voyage is just extraordinary," Falcon-Lang added. "We can see there's more to learn. There are a lot of very, very significant fossils in there that we didn't know existed."

He said one of the most "bizarre" slides came from Hooker's collection — a specimen of prototaxites, a 400 million-year-old tree-sized fungus.

Hooker had assembled the collection of slides while briefly working for the British Geological Survey in 1846, according to Royal Holloway, University of London.

The slides — "stunning works of art," according to Falcon-Lang — contain bits of fossil wood and plants ground into thin sheets and affixed to glass in order to be studied under microscopes. Some of the slides are half a foot long (15 centimeters), "great big chunks of glass," Falcon-Lang said.

"How these things got overlooked for so long is a bit of a mystery itself," he mused, speculating that perhaps it was because Darwin was not widely known in 1846 so the collection might not have been given "the proper curatorial care."

Royal Holloway, University of London said the fossils were 'lost' because Hooker failed to number them in the formal "specimen register" before setting out on an expedition to the Himalayas. In 1851, the "unregistered" fossils were moved to the Museum of Practical Geology in Piccadilly before being transferred to the South Kensington's Geological Museum in 1935 and then to the British Geological Survey's headquarters near Nottingham 50 years later, the university said.

The discovery was made in April, but it has taken "a long time" to figure out the provenance of the slides and photograph all of them, Falcon-Lang said. The slides have now been photographed and will be made available to the public through a new online museum exhibit opening Tuesday.

Falcon-Lang expects great scientific papers to emerge from the discovery.

"There are some real gems in this collection that are going to contribute to ongoing science."

Dr. John Ludden, executive director of the Geological Survey, called the find a "remarkable" discovery.

"It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections," he said.

Thalattosaur's fossilized skeleton found in Alaska

What causes an "extreme low tide"?

"Rare fossil of sea reptile found on Alaska beach"

by

Yereth Rosen

July 29th, 2011

Reuters

Alaska scientists have discovered the fossil of a rare, prehistoric marine reptile that is likely the most complete remnant of the creature ever found in North America.

The nearly complete fossilized skeleton is of a thalattosaur, a long-tailed sea creature that plied warm, shallow waters in the early days of dinosaurs and became extinct at the end of the Triassic period some 200 million years ago.

The discovery of the fossil, found during an extreme low tide along the shore of the Tongass National Forest, was announced this week by the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

"We were just having our morning coffee out on the outcropping when somebody said, 'What's that?'" Jim Baichtal, the U.S. Forest Service's Tongass geologist and part of the discovery team, said on Thursday.

Geologists had been conducting field surveys at the site when the fossil was spotted.

Unlike most thalattosaur discoveries, which are fossilized remnants of individual bones and bone fragments, this specimen appeared to be a nearly full skeleton.

"In North America, this may be the most articulated specimen that we have right now," Baichtal said.

Scientists excavated the fossil in June and have been studying it to determine whether it represents a previously unknown species.

There are only about a dozen full thalattosaur specimens in the world, Baichtal said. "So the probability of this being something that wasn't seen before is probably pretty high," he said.

The find is likely the most northern discovery as well, Baichtal said. The fossil was found near the Tlingit Indian village of Kake in southeast Alaska.

Other thalattosaur discoveries have been made in British Columbia, Canada, as well as in Nevada and the Alps, though the best finds have been made in China, he said.

SITE WAS TROPICAL

At the time this particular animal was trapped in sediment, about 200 million to 220 million years ago, the site was close to the equator and tropical, Baichtal said.

"This was a warm, volcanic island with reefs surrounding it," similar to Hawaii, he said. Plate tectonics eventually sent the site drifting north to its present location in Alaska, he said.

The fossil from the Tongass beach is now at the Museum of the North, where scientists will do further work to separate the rock from the bone.

Thalattosaurs inhabited the seas for about 30 million years, a relatively brief time geologically, said Pat Druckenmiller, earth sciences curator for the Museum of the North. They measured about three to 10 feet long, with half to a third of that taken up by the tail, he said.

"The rest of its body would be kind of reminiscent of a big lizard," he said, with legs modified to work as paddles.

Some had no teeth, some had pointy teeth that might have been useful for spearing fish, and some had flat teeth that might have been used to crush shells, Druckenmiller said.

The Alaska fossil appears to include the outline of soft-body tissue that surrounded the bone.

"That's really rare," Druckenmiller said. "That might give us some idea of what the actual body shape was."

Scientists will return to the site later to try to excavate the rest of the fossil, still embedded in beach rock, Druckenmiller said.

"We don't know if the skull will be there or not, but I have high hopes that it will be there," he said.

Dino wars

Legal wranglings over some old bones...money always appears to be a factor.

"The Dinosaur Fossil Wars"

Across the American West, legal battles over dinosaur fossils are on the rise as amateur prospectors make major finds

by

Donovan Webster

April 2009

Smithsonian

Editor’s note: On August 6, 2009, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling that Ron Frithiof did not engage in fraud and that he and his team can retain ownership rights of Tinker the Tyrannosaurus .

Buried beneath a barren stretch of South Dakota badland, the deceased appeared small for its species. As Ron Frithiof, an Austin, Texas, real-estate developer turned dinosaur prospector, dug cautiously around it in a rugged expanse of backcountry, he was growing increasingly confident that he and his partners were uncovering a once-in-a-lifetime find.

Ever since he had heard about a private collection going up for sale in the mid-1990s, Frithiof, now 61, had been hunting dinosaurs. "I'd thought fossils were things you could see only in museums," he says. "When I learned you could go out and find stuff like that, to keep or even to sell, it just lit a fire in my imagination. I studied every book I could, learned techniques of extraction. Fossils inspire a powerful curiosity."

Frithiof was keenly aware that the skeleton of a mature Tyrannosaurus rex ( "Sue," named in honor of prospector Sue Hendrickson, who made the find in western South Dakota in 1990) had been auctioned off-at Sotheby's in New York City in 1997-for more than $8 million. The specimen that Frithiof and his fellow excavators began unearthing in 1998, in a painstaking, inch-by-inch dig was about four feet tall, less than half Sue's height. With unfused vertebrae and scrawny shin and ankle bones, the skeleton was almost certainly that of a juvenile. If so, it would likely be the most complete young T. rex ever discovered. A find of this magnitude, Frithiof knew, would create a sensation. Its value would be, as he put it, "anyone's guess." $9 million? $10 million? This was uncharted territory.

For nearly three years, the excavators-including longtime fossil hunter Kim Hollrah, who had first investigated the site-continued their meticulous work. Whenever Frithiof, Hollrah and their companions could coordinate time off from work, they would drive 24 hours straight, from Texas to the dig site, north of Belle Fourche, South Dakota, which Frithiof had leased from a local rancher in 1998. "Most years, we'd spend about a month working," he recalls. "Thirty or 40 days a summer, before the weather would drive us off."

Braving blistering 100-degree temperatures, the crew took every precaution to keep the specimen intact. At the same time, they were attempting to wrest it from the ground before South Dakota's brutal winter set in. "That's one of the paradoxes of fossil collecting," says Frithiof. "Once a specimen is exposed to the elements, it's a race to get it out in as responsible a way as possible, to protect it from wind and rain and weathering. It's like a slow-motion race."

Paleontological excavation is nothing if not grueling. "We worked inch by inch, brushing bits of rock and soil away, taking a pin to strip away just that next little bit of rock and earth [to reveal the rough contours]," Frithiof told me. On a good day, an experienced fossil excavator might uncover only a few inches of skeleton. Frithiof and the others gingerly pried out each section, still enclosed in the crumbly chunk of rock matrix that had originally surrounded it. In preparation for transport, the prospectors then wrapped the sections in layers of tissue paper, aluminum foil and plaster.

As the dig moved forward, Frithiof's colleagues, with a nod to "Sue" (today a centerpiece attraction at Chicago's Field Museum), decided the new T. rex needed a name. The one they came up with honored Frithiof's role as the project's financial backer. "I don't know why my parents started calling me Tinker," says Frithiof. "Somehow, it stuck."

In 2001, as the excavation of Tinker headed toward completion, the team made another remarkable discovery: evidence of two additional T. rex skeletons on the site. By that point, a children's museum in the Midwest had indicated its willingness to pay up to $8.5 million for Tinker. During the prospective purchaser's pre-transaction research, however, a massive legal hiccup was uncovered-one that Frithiof and his lawyers would later insist had been an honest mistake.

Tinker, as it turned out, had been found not from local rancher Gary Gilbert's land but from adjacent property owned by Harding County, South Dakota. In November 2000, Frithiof, he says, with an eye to future excavations, had leased the parcel from the county; the agreement stipulated that the county would get 10 percent of the sale price for any fossils uncovered there. Now, in August 2004, Harding County filed a civil lawsuit in Federal District Court against Frithiof and his partners alleging fraud, trespass and conspiracy.

Frithiof's world caved in. After devoting years to Tinker, the prospector was suddenly in danger of going to jail for his efforts. "This whole experience has been a disaster," he says. "[With] all the lawyers' fees, not to mention the disruption of my life, it's cost me a fortune. And it's been very hard on my family. You gotta remember, I've never been in trouble in my life. Not even a traffic ticket." The disputed dinosaur, according to Frithiof's attorney Joe Ellingson, "wrecked my client's life."

Moreover, the fossil was consigned to limbo. As a result of byzantine twists in the litigation, Tinker's bones would soon be placed under another lawyer's supervision, stored in plastic tubs at an undisclosed location in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-1,400 miles from the excavation site.

Across the American West and Great Plains, an intensifying conflict over the excavation of fossils-everything from a five-inch shark's tooth, which might sell for $50, to Frithiof's spectacular T. rex-has pitted amateur excavators against both the federal government and scientists. Scores, perhaps thousands, of prospectors-some operating as poachers on federally protected land-are conducting digs across hundreds of thousands of square miles from the Dakotas to Texas, Utah, Wyoming and Montana.

"In terms of digging for fossils, there are a lot more people" than there used to be, says Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosauria at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. "Twenty years ago, if you ran into a private or commercial fossil prospector in the field, it was one person or a couple of people. Now, you go to good fossil locations in, say, Wyoming, and you find quarrying operations with maybe 20 people working, and doing a professional job of excavating fossils."

Fueling the frenzy is skyrocketing market demand, as fossils, long relegated to the dusty realm of museum shelves, have entered the glitzy spheres of home décor and art. "There have always been private fossil collectors," says David Herskowitz of Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas. "The difference is, historically, a private fossil collector was wealthy. But today, interest in fossils has grabbed the attention of a broad swath of the population. That means a lot more people are collecting."

Who's buying these days? Just about anyone. With prices to suit virtually any budget, one can own an ancient remnant of life on earth: a botanical fossil, such as a fern, may cost as little as $20; a fossil snail, perhaps, may well go for $400.

The real action, however, is in the big vertebrates: dinosaurs that roamed the earth between 65 million and 220 million years ago. These are the specimens attracting the high rollers-serious collectors. Actors Harrison Ford and Nicolas Cage, for example, are rumored to have impressive collections.

The paleo-passion, however, extends far beyond celebrities. "The group who used to be serious fossil collectors-that's really grown," says money manager Charles Lieberman of Advisors Capital Management in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. At his office, Lieberman displays several impressive specimens, including a three-foot-long Cretaceous herbivore, Psittacosaurus. "Since the book and movie Jurassic Park," he adds, "interest in fossil collecting has gone into overdrive, affecting demand and elevating prices."

The rise in prices is fueling the prospecting boom in the Great Plains and West-not necessarily because of a higher concentration of fossils there, but because the American West is one of the world's easiest places to find them. "If you had flown around the world 150 million years ago, the West wouldn't be more populated by dinosaurs than anywhere else," says the Smithsonian's Carrano. "But in the West, the rock layers laid down during the age of dinosaurs are currently exposed. It also helps that the landscape is dry, so there's not a lot of vegetation covering the rock. And it's erosive, so new rock is constantly being uncovered."

While fossils can now be found in stores from Moab to Manhattan, the most unusual (and valuable) specimens tend to show up at auction houses-or vanish into the shadowy world of private purchasers, some of whom are buying on the black market. At the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, for instance, it is possible to obtain illegally taken fossils. While Carrano does not attend the show, it's well-known, he says, that, "if you spend the week building trust with some of the sellers, you’ll get invited back to a hotel room and be shown exquisite fossil specimens that were probably taken illegally. We’re talking museum-grade specimens that are going to disappear into private collections."

The auction houses, of course, make sure their offerings come with documented provenance. In only a few hours in April 2007, Christie's in Paris gaveled off fossils worth more than $1.5 million-including a dinosaur egg that went for $97,500 and the fossilized skeleton of a Siberian mammoth that fetched $421,200. In December 2007, a 70-million-year- old mosasaur a-30-foot carnivorous underwater reptile excavated in North Africa-brought more than $350,000 at Los Angeles auctioneer Bonhams & Butterfields. In January 2008, Heritage Auction Gal­leries in Dallas sold the largest mastodon skull ever found for $191,000 and a 55-million-year-old lizard from the Dominican Republic, its flesh and skin preserved in amber, for $97,000. "The day's tally was $4.187 million," says auction director Herskowitz. "While I can't disclose who my buyers were, I can say many of them have small to substantive museums on their properties."

Then there's eBay. When I logged on recently, I discovered 838 fossil specimens for sale, including a spectacular ammonite-an ancestor of today's chambered nautilus-expected to go for upward of $3,000. Very little was disclosed about where any of the fossils came from. "Here's what I can tell you about eBay," says Carrano. "If a fossil being sold there comes from Morocco, China, Mongolia, Argentina or a number of other nations, at some point it was part of an illegal process, since those countries don't allow commercial fossil export."

In the United States, the law regulating fossil excavation and export is far from straightforward. Property statutes state that any fossil taken with permission from privately owned land may be owned and sold-which is why legitimate excavators usually harvest fossils from individual landowners. A complex series of regulations apply to fossils removed from federal and state land (including Bureau of Land Management [BLM] tracts, national forests and grasslands, and state and national parks) and what are known as jurisdictional lands-for example, the public land held by Harding County, South Dakota.

To complicate matters, some fossil materials-limited amounts of petrified wood or fossil plants, for example-may be removed from certain public lands without oversight or approval. In most cases, however, permits are required; applications are reviewed according to a time-consuming process. Prospectors who want to cash in quickly on a single find are often reluctant to abide by the law. Given that there are nearly 500 million acres of publicly held land in the United States (two-thirds of which contain some of the best excavation zones in the world), prospectors who dig illegally are not often caught. "Newly harvested fossils are flooding the commercial market," says Larry Shackelford, a special agent with the BLM in Salt Lake City. "Running down each one and checking where it came from? We don't have the manpower."

In fact, law enforcement officials can barely keep up with prosecutions already underway. Although state and federal officials may not discuss cases currently in litigation, they acknowledge that volume is increasing. "In most districts, we easily see one or two new leads a month," says Bart Fitzgerald, a BLM special agent in Arizona. "Mostly these become civil cases. We understand that enthusiasm gets the best of people sometimes. Someone finds an amazing fossil and they take it home. Mostly we just want to recover the fossil-it's government property. But once in a while, we see a case where clearly the intent was criminal: where people were knowingly extracting fossils from public land for private profit. Those we prosecute criminally."

A major criminal case began unfolding in 2006, when a largely intact Allosaurus-a meat-eating older cousin of T. rex-was taken from public land in Utah. The excavator went to great lengths to look legitimate, including creating bogus letters of provenance. The dinosaur bones were first transported from Utah to a U.S. buyer, then to a purchaser in Europe, before finally being sold to a collector in Asia. In February 2007, the Allosaurus poacher-who had been turned in anonymously-was convicted on one count of theft of federal property.

Several years earlier, a high-profile case involved paleo-prospector Larry Walker, who discovered a cache of fossil Therizinosaurs-a rare dinosaur/bird hybrid-in the desert outside his Moab, Utah, hometown. Working at night beneath camouflage netting, Walker excavated 30 to 40 of the creatures' distinctive ripping claws, then sold the specimens at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show for a total take of roughly $15,000.

"He knew what he was doing was illegal," says Loren Good, a special agent for the BLM's Idaho district. "Working with the FBI, we did a joint investigation into the source of the claws and prosecuted Mr. Walker. He received a ten-month incarceration and a $15,000 fine."

"These cases come in all forms," says the BLM's Fitzgerald. "Take the example of some tour operators in Montana. They took a group of tourists out recently on a fossil-hunting trip, strayed onto public land and extracted fossils from a good site there. Was it an honest mistake or a calculated commercial move?" Fitzgerald asks. "After all, the tour operators carried GPS units; they knew precisely where they were." (Charges have not yet been filed.)

In the Tinker case, the prosecution claimed that Frithiof knew he was on county property when he found the Tinker specimen, that he had signed the agreement with Harding County without informing officials of the find and that he had negotiated a perhaps $8.5 million sale without telling the county. "Harding County believes Mr. Frithiof first discovered the specimen's location, then induced the county into a lease, knowing the value of what existed on the property without disclosing it to us," says Ken Barker, a Belle Fourche, South Dakota, attorney retained by the county to prosecute the case. "Because of this, we seek to void the lease agreement, entered into fraudulently, and to recover the county's property."

Frithiof sees things differently. It wasn't until the prospective purchaser's survey in 2001, he says, that all parties learned that the Tinker site was on county land. "We were something like 100 feet across the [county] property boundary," he says. "Even the rancher we were working with believed we were on his land. It was an honest mistake. And I already had a lease on that land with Harding County."

"It wasn't like we were sneaking around," Frithiof adds. "Our find had been in the newspaper. We'd been on the Discovery Channel. We'd had prominent paleontologists, like Bob Bakker from the University of Colorado, out to look at it. What we were doing was all out in the open. Nobody thought we were doing anything illegal...at all."

In June 2006, Judge Richard Battey of the United States District Court voided the agreement between Frithiof and the county and ruled, on the basis of a technicality, that Tinker belonged to Harding County. Frithiof appealed. In September 2007, a United States Court of Appeals panel reversed the decision. The Tinker fossil, they ruled, was Frithiof's property; only the original contract's 10 percent payment was owed to Harding County. The appeals court then sent the case back to Federal District Court for final disposition. Frithiof had no choice but to wait.

In the meantime, the location of Tinker-and the fossil's condition-had become a source of contention. Before the legal wrangling began, Frithiof had delivered sections of the skeleton to private curators Barry and April James, who specialized in preparation of paleontological specimens for display, at their Sunbury, Pennsylvania, firm, Prehistoric Journeys. (The process involves removal of the stone matrix encasing the excavated bones.) Once the litigation proceeded, however, the Jameses, who say they had put $200,000 worth of labor and more than two years into the project, were barred from completing the work or collecting payment from Frithiof. Their company filed for bankruptcy in 2005.

"Now I have the Tinker fossil in my possession," says Larry Frank, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, attorney who is trustee of the James bankruptcy. "I've filed an artisans' lien against the value of the specimen. Until the matter is resolved, the skeleton will sit in large plastic containers in my possession. We believe that's a good, safe place for it."

For scientists, commercial excavation of fossils-legal or not-raises troubling questions. "For me," says Mark Norell, chairman and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, "the big concern with all this private digging is that it may be robbing science of valuable knowledge."

Norell believes that anyone harvesting fossils "needs to be considerate of scientific data surrounding the specimen." Context is important. "A lot of the guys out there digging commercially are just cowboys; they don't care about the site where the fossil sits, how it's oriented in the earth, what can be found around it to give us clues to what the world was like when that fossil animal died." Some commercial excavators "want only to get the specimen out of the ground and get paid-so we lose the context of the site as well as the fossil itself."

The Smithsonian's Carrano says all scientifically significant fossil specimens, whether from public or private lands, should be placed into museums for study in perpetuity. "Any unique fossil has more value scientifically and educationally than we can ever place a cash value on," he adds. "In a perfect world, there'd be a way to vet every fossil collected: the significant ones would be retained and studied; others could go to commercial use. Not every fossil shark's tooth is significant, but some are. Let's retain those significant ones for study."

For the past several years, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, one of the fossil world's preeminent professional organizations, has lobbied in support of Congressional legislation that would protect fossils taken from public lands. Since 2001, a bill introduced by Representative James McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts-the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act-has languished in both the House and Senate. The delay, some proponents believe, stems from some western lawmakers' reluctance to add any regulations regarding public lands. If passed into law, the act would require that only trained, federally certified professionals be allowed to extract fossils from public lands-and would substantially increase penalties for illegal fossil excavation.

The proposed legislation has galvanized critics, from mining company executives to paleontology prospectors, many of whom argue that improved enforcement of existing laws is all that is needed. "This new bill provides no funding for additional federal agents to police these areas, meaning it has no teeth," says Jack Kallmeyer, a paleontological prospector. "As long as there is demand for the commodity, without sufficient enforcement personnel, nothing will stop illegal collecting."

Kallmeyer also notes that proposed and existing fossil-extraction laws do not address a critical threat to the nation's fossil heritage. "There are a number of dinosaur and [other] vertebrate fossils out there [on public lands] that are not rare. Professional paleontologists aren't interested in excavating them, as those specimens are well known and well studied. Why shouldn't amateur or commercial collectors be allowed to extract those?" Fossils left exposed over years, Kallmeyer adds, will eventually erode away.

But paleontologist James Clark of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who serves on the government liaison committee for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, disagrees. "Nobody knows how much fossil material is being taken off public lands and smuggled out," he says. "We don't know the scale of what's being lost." Clark, who sees the proposed federal bill as a step forward, believes that existing legislation is too nonspecific and confusing. "As it stands now, the situation is a free-for-all," he says.

Through the winter of 2007-2008, as Frithiof awaited another ruling from Federal District Court, he and lawyer Joe Ellingson hunkered down. "We don't want to say much," Ellingson told me. "We don't want to antagonize anyone in any way. We just want to wait and get our ruling."

The delay, however, proved excruciating for Frithiof, who continued living near Austin, selling real estate. "There's not one hour," he says, "that it wasn't in the back of my mind. And that takes a toll. Even a physical toll." Frithiof says he developed cardiac problems. "I just want this all to be over," he says, "so I can go back to my site and keep working. We've found evidence of two other T. rex specimens there, but we don't know if they're complete or not. We've covered them up to protect against the elements. Until all this is resolved, we've been barred from working."

At last, on February 5, 2008, Judge Battey ruled that Frithiof's lease with Harding County was legal and enforceable. Frithiof owned Tinker, though he would have to give the county 10 percent of any profits from its sale. Harding County, the decree said, "knowingly entered into this contract, and now must live with the consequences of its actions." For Frithiof, the ruling meant "a huge weight had disappeared off my life."

But within weeks of the ruling, Harding County appealed yet again, sending the case back into court and consigning Frithiof once again to legal limbo. After more than four years of litigation, disposition of the appeal is expected within weeks. "This experience has removed the joy of fossil hunting for me," says Frithiof. "I haven't done one day of digging since the day initial charges were brought."

And yet, Frithiof tells me, an even larger question preoccupies him. "My thoughts always return to the exposed fossils out there on our public land," he adds. "Fossils that are going unexcavated due to lack of interest. The ones paleontologists are never going to extract because they are fossils that are too common, but which some collector might cherish."

Frithiof insists that careful amateur excavators can make a significant contribution to science. "The fossils are out there, wind and rain weathering them, while people argue about who is allowed to collect them and who isn't. After a year or two of exposure, any fossil begins to disintegrate and crumble to dust." And then, he adds, "Well, nobody gets them. They're just gone."

Writer Donovan Webster lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Photographer Aaron Huey is based in Seattle, Washington.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of paleontologist Bob Bakker and incorrectly stated he is with the University of Montana. He is with the University of Colorado.

Samson is up for auction--3rd complete T-Rex

Invest in the old...fossil, that is

One of the two ammonite fossils being sold at the Natural History sale in Paris on April 7, 2009

What is the fascination for very old things to purchase and own? Is it a true interest in the science of the artifact? Is it for aesthetic reasons? Is it like precious metals...a means of investment? Who knows. But a recent discovery in Canada [100-million-year-old petrified shell of an extinct Canadian ammonite fossil] will go to the auction house with an expected auction value of 135 million. Invest wisely.

"Iridescent Alberta fossils hot items at auction"

by

Randy Boswell,

March 24th, 2009

Canwest News Service

The stunningly beautiful, 100-million-year-old petrified shell of an extinct Canadian marine creature is expected to fetch a small fortune at an auction next month in France, the latest sign of exploding interest in the brilliantly coloured ammonite fossils of southern Alberta.

The latest showcase specimen, a 44-cm-wide spiral of shimmering rock unearthed in the fossil-rich Bearpaw shales south of Lethbridge, is valued at about $135,000 ahead of Christie's April 7 sale of natural history artifacts at its auction house in Paris.

A second, smaller Bearpaw ammonite still encased in stone has an estimated value of more than $80,000 and is being offered at the same sale.

Noting the "exceptional quality" of the bigger fossil, Christie's spokesperson Capucine Milliot said the object is "extremely rare" because the "precious stone with bright and iridescent colours comes exclusively from southern Alberta."

Earlier this week, a 50-cm Alberta ammonite hailed for its "completely opalized green, blue, yellow and red" colouring sold for $60,000 at a New York auction. Last year, a 70-cm Bearpaw specimen was purchased for a world record $300,000 at a sale in the U.S. -- more than twice the pre-sale estimate.

"That's a very big number," says Pierre Pare, president of Calgary-based Korite International Ltd., Canada's main producer of ammolite -- the brilliant, opal-like gemstone derived from the shells of ammonite fossils.

"Prices have been going up because there's more and more awareness about the (ammonite's) beauty and relative rarity."

He says demand for the fossils -- formed from the remains of a primitive mollusk that died out at the end of the dinosaur age 65 million years ago -- is also being driven globally by practitioners of the Chinese esthetics system feng shui, who covet the Alberta ammonite's bright colours and spiral shape.

While ammonites can be found in many countries, the conditions creating the dazzling hues of the Canadian fossils "existed only in one place in the world -- right here in southern Alberta," says Mr. Pare.

The Bearpaw shales of Alberta and Saskatchewan and the adjacent U.S. states were formed as the seabed of an ancient inland ocean. The multi-coloured stone found in the preserved remains of the ammonite -- a species believed to be related to the modern-day octopus, squid and nautilus -- were traditionally used for decorations by people of the Blood Nation, native inhabitants of the region who continue mining the substance today.

Mr. Pare says the ammolite shards extracted from the Korite mine near Lethbridge came from ammonite shells that were fractured through millions of years of geological change. But about 50 times a year, fairly intact fossils are discovered and sold to museums or collectors around the world.

Each ammonite exported from Canada requires a permit from provincial experts and a branch of the federal Department of Canadian Heritage. Occasionally, scientifically valuable specimens are retained for study.

In 2007, Korite donated a particular impressive, 60-cm ammonite to the New York City's American Museum of Natural History.


Meteorites--losing their value?

Thanks to "old fossil" stringer Tim.

Serendipity again...in Massachusetts

This undated handout image shows what U.S. researchers say appears to be the oldest imprint of a prehistoric insect, made while the dragonfly-like creature was still alive. The fossilized remains were uncovered two weeks ago at a rocky outcrop near a large shopping center in North Attleboro, Massachusetts and is believed to have been made by an insect about three inches (7.6 cm) long as it stood on mud some 312 million years ago.

Perhaps this feature, "serendipity", should be given more consideration in the realm of science. Many discoveries were manifested by "chance".

"Ancient insect imprint found in Massachusetts"

by

Gene Emery

December 3rd, 2008

Reuters

U.S. researchers say they have discovered what appears to be the oldest imprint of a prehistoric insect, made while the dragonfly-like creature was still alive.

The imprint found at a rocky outcrop near a large shopping center in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, is believed to have been made by an insect about three inches long as it stood on mud some 312 million years ago.

"It's not a dragonfly but picture a dragonfly-like body. We're looking at something related, maybe a mayfly. They have the same body plan," said the discoverer, Richard Knecht, a geology student at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

The fossilized remains of a wing that may have belonged to the same species were uncovered two weeks ago.

The imprint of the insect shows the thorax and abdomen, along with six legs, two of which may have moved slightly to create drag marks that hardened into burgundy-colored stone.

"It's unusual to see a flying insect make such a deep impression in this muddy sediment," said Tufts paleontologist Jake Brenner. "We don't have many good body fossils from this time period with these early flying insects. The level of detail is really unseen in continental deposits."

At the time the impression was made, insects and amphibians were common. Reptiles, the ancestors of the dinosaurs, were just beginning to come to prominence.

Many of the fossilized remains of insects show only individual body parts, such as a wing left behind when a predator ate the rest. The impression of an intact insect "fills in the blanks of what we imagined," Knecht said in a telephone interview.

The rock that contained the fossil broke off in Knecht's hands as he was trying to rediscover an outcrop that had yielded four-digit footprints of an ancient amphibian the day before.

"It was a really lucky find," he said.


Imagination/Science

The nerd and entrepreneur

Flatfish fossils fill evolutionary link?

Skull of heteronectes chaneti, showing incomplete orbital migration intermediate between generalized fishes and living flatfishes.

Say that five time with no errors. One has to ask in form of the "Capitol One" commercial..."What's in your fossil collection"?

Is this a case for "evolution"?:

"What we found was an intermediate stage between living flatfishes and the arrangement found in other fishes," he said. These two fossil fishes "indicate that the evolution of the profound cranial asymmetry of extant flatfishes was gradual in nature."


physorg.com:

"Flatfish fossils fill in evolutionary missing link"

Hidden away in museums for more that 100 years, some recently rediscovered flatfish fossils have filled a puzzling gap in the story of evolution and answered a question that initially stumped even Charles Darwin.

All adult flatfishes--including the gastronomically familiar flounder, plaice, sole, turbot, and halibut--have asymmetrical skulls, with both eyes located on one side of the head. Because these fish lay on their sides at the ocean bottom, this arrangement enhances their vision, with both eyes constantly in play, peering up into the water.

This remarkable arrangement arises during the youth of every flatfish, where the symmetrical larva undergoes a metamorphosis to produce an asymmetrical juvenile. One eye 'migrates' up and over the top of the head before coming to rest in the adult position on the opposite side of the skull.

Opponents of evolution, however, insisted that this curious anatomy could not have evolved gradually through natural selection because there would be no apparent evolutionary advantage to a fish with a slightly asymmetrical skull but which retained eyes on opposite sides of the head. No fish—fossil or living—had ever been discovered with such an intermediate condition.

But in the 10 July 2008 issue of Nature, Matt Friedman, graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago and a member of the Department of Geology at the Field Museum, draws attention to several examples of such transitional forms that he uncovered in museum collections of underwater fossilized creatures from the Eocene epoch--about 50 million years ago.

"We owe this discovery, in part, to the European fondness for limestone," said Friedman. The fossils, which he found in museums in England, France, Italy, and Austria, came from limestone quarries in Northern Italy and underneath modern-day Paris.

Friedman examined multiple adult fossil remains of two primitive flatfishes, Amphistium and a new genus that he named Heteronectes.

"Amphistium has been known for quite some time," he said. "The first specimen was described more than 200 years ago, but its placement in the fish evolutionary tree has been uncertain ever since. Close examination of these fossils yield clues that they are indeed early flatfishes."

The most primitive flatfishes known, both Amphistium and Heteronectes have many characteristics that are no longer found in modern flatfish. But the one that caught Friedman's attention was the partial displacement of one eye, evident even in the first Amphistium fossil discovered over two centuries ago.

"Most remarkably," he said, "orbital migration, the movement of one eye from one side of the skull to the other during the larval stage, was present but incomplete in both of these primitive flatfishes." For both sets of fossils, the eye had begun the journey but had not crossed the midline from one side of the fish to the other.

"What we found was an intermediate stage between living flatfishes and the arrangement found in other fishes," he said. These two fossil fishes "indicate that the evolution of the profound cranial asymmetry of extant flatfishes was gradual in nature."

The Amphistium fossils were known and previously analyzed but not definitively linked to flatfish. Previous studies, relying on conventional techniques, did not detect the oddly shaped skull, but by performing CT scans on the fossils Friedman "unequivocally" demonstrated the cranial asymmetry.

Careful study of the Heteronectes chaneti fossil found that it represents a new genus. The genus name is derived from the Greek Heteros (different) and nectri (swimmer). The species, chaneti, honors Bruno Chanet, a pioneer in the study of fossil flatfish.

The two fossil sets "deliver the first clear picture of flatfish origins," said Friedman, "a hotly contested issue in debates on the mode and tempo of evolution."

Charles Darwin was baffled by what he referred to as the "remarkable peculiarity" of flatfish anatomy. "During early youth," he noted, the eyes "stand opposite to each other…Soon the eye proper to the lower side begins to glide slowly round the head to the upper side…The chief advantages thus gained seem to be protection from their enemies, and a facility for feeding on the ground."

Although the survival advantages of such asymmetry were clear, Darwin, when challenged, was unable to explain the mechanism of what appeared to be a rather sudden and radical change in morphology and suggested a Lamarckian adaptation in which the fish, through "muscular action," slowly pulled the down-side eye toward the upper side. The resulting distortion, he suggested, "would no doubt be increased through the principle of inheritance."

Darwin's explanation, which relied on the inheritance of acquired traits, preceded the discovery of genes, but geneticist Robert Goldschmidt, tackling the same flatfish issue in the 1930s, came up with a genetic explanation. He argued that such a sudden drastic change could be triggered by a single fortuitous mutation that triggered a deformity, which in some environments would prove beneficial--and then get passed on. He termed these sudden accidental evolutionary leaps "hopeful monsters," and made the mysterious origin of flatfishes the centerpiece of his argument.

Friedman's discovery eliminates the need for such optimistic accidents. It "refutes these claims of radical sudden change" he said, "and demonstrates that the assembly of the flatfish body plan occurred in a gradual, stepwise fashion."

Source: University of Chicago

Junior paleontologists--"hands on" experience

If you like fossils, dinosaurs and the like and are a youngster, check this out. A cool way to reach out to budding paleontologists.

"Dinosaur Fossils In Utah Inspire 'Jr. Paleontologists'"

by

Jeff Brady

July 2nd, 2008

National Public Radio

Millions of years ago, northeastern Utah was a hot spot for dinosaurs. Today, people travel to the Dinosaur National Monument located on the borders of Colorado and Utah to see the leftover dinosaur bones. Visitors can see as many as 1,500 Jurassic-era fossils exposed on the cliff face of the Douglass Quarry.

Justin Hazelwood, 10, is the family expert and an aspiring paleontologist. His mother, Kay, says his obsession has become a family learning experience.

"I didn't know anything about dinosaurs until he got interested in them when he was, like, 3," she says. "We used to read dinosaur information books at bedtime. My mom refused to read them because she couldn't pronounce the names. She's like, 'I'm not reading those!' "

The Hazelwoods traveled to the monument from Lexington, Ky., recently, and Justin aimed to become an official "junior paleontologist," a designation that comes with an impressive gold star badge. He worked his way through an activity book picking out and circling the dinosaurs on a page filled with all kinds of animals.

"The ones that flew, swam in water and that are mammals are not dinosaurs," he explains. "Dinosaurs were all reptiles."

The activity booklet is relatively new, and National Park Service officials say its goal is to teach the 2,000 or so kids who come through the each summer that fossils tell a story about the past and that they shouldn't stick them in their pocket.

There's also a guided walk to be completed before Justin is able to earn his coveted title. After a short bus ride and a climb up a steep trail along a rock face, Justin and another aspiring junior paleontologist, Tyler Sachse, spot something sticking out of the rock.

"My sisters think it looks like wood, but I sort of think it looks like bone," says Sachse, who is visiting from Jupiter, Fla. "And I looked at it like this and I see very, very small holes in it. I know some bones have holes in them so it can, like, make blood and stuff."

The hike ends, and everyone returns to the visitor center where Park Ranger Matt Greuel leads the group in taking their pledge, before conferring the badges.