Hook-Beaked Lizard Fossil Discovery In Utah

This rendering of Gryposaurus monumentensis shows its robust jaws that allowed this creature to eat just about any vegetation it stumbled across. The newest dinosaur species to emerge from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument had some serious bite, according to researchers from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah. “It was one of the most robust duck-billed dinosaurs ever,” said museum paleontologist Terry Gates, who is also with the U.’s Department of Geology and Geophysics. “It was a monster.” Graphic Credit: Art by Larry Felder

Hook-Beaked Lizard Fossil Discovery In Utah

Gryposaurus monumentensis, a new and very large duck-billed dinosaur species was recently uncovered in Utah at the infamous Grand Staircase-Escalante national Monument. What makes this discovery unique is that not only did this creature have a set of intimidating teeth … it was very large.

The age of Gryposaurus is set to be back about 75 million years and is suspected to be the largest dinosaur found in this fossil strata formation.

While the teeth and the size of this discovery seem monstrous and threatening, not to worry, “Grypo” is a plant eater.

Utah Museum of Natural History researchers at the University of Utah prepared the skull of a new species of duck-billed dinosaur -- Gryposaurus monumentensis -- which was discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Image Credit: Utah Museum of Natural History

This excerpted from a Newswise press release -

A Toothy New Duck-Billed Dinosaur from Southern Utah
Newswise - University of Utah - Released: Thu 27-Sep-2007, 22:00 ET - Embargo expired: Wed 03-Oct-2007

The newest dinosaur species to emerge from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument had some serious bite, according to researchers from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah.

“It was one of the most robust duck-billed dinosaurs ever,” said museum paleontologist Terry Gates, who is also with the U.’s Department of Geology and Geophysics. “It was a monster.”

Researchers from the Utah museum, the national monument and California’s Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology unearthed fossils of this ancient plant-eater from the rocks of the Kaiparowits Formation. Researchers announced the name of the creature – Gryposaurus monumentensis. (Gryposaurusmeans “hook-beaked lizard” and monumentensis honors the monument where the fossils were found.)

The first description of the duck-billed dinosaur – which dates to the Late Cretaceous Period 75 million years ago – appears in the Oct. 3 issue of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

“Gryposaurus monumentensis is probably the largest dinosaur in the 75-million-year-old Kaiparowits fossil ecosystem,” said Alan Titus, paleontologist for the national monument.

Gates, lead author on the study, explained that this creature could have eaten just about any vegetation it stumbled across. “With its robust jaws, no plant stood a chance against G. monumentensis,” he said.
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Finding the skull

In 2002, a team from the Alf Museum, in Claremont, Calif., located at the Webb School, discovered the site that contained the skull used to describe the new creature.
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The California team was working a stretch of Grand Staircase that Utah researchers had not examined. Duncan Everhart, a Pennsylvania furniture maker, is credited with finding the skull.

Don Lofgren, curator of the Alf Museum, said the team received permission from the monument to dig deeper in 2003.

“We determined it was a skull sitting upside down with the jaw on top,” he said.

Once Gates went out to take a look in 2004, he quickly realized the California team had a potentially-important find. The Alf Museum gave the Utah researchers permission to prepare and study the skull.

Titus noted the discovery of this new species was a team effort involving the Alf Museum, the Utah Museum of Natural History and the national monument.

“The cooperative effort put into its collection and research has truly been a model for scientific investigation on public lands,” he said.

It wasn’t until Utah researchers began working on the skull in 2005 that the full significance of the find began to emerge, Gates said.

The well-preserved skull was initially missing key pieces from the nose region. Fortunately, the California museum had collected a box full of eroded bones, including bits of the nose bone, which was critical for identifying the creature.

“I knew immediately that we had some species of Gryposaurus,” Gates said.

A toothy beast

The creature’s large number of teeth embedded in the thick skull is among the features that made G. monumentensis, as well as other closely related duck-billed dinosaurs, such a successful herbivore.

At any given time, the dinosaur had over 300 teeth available to slice up plant material. Inside the jaw bone, there were numerous replacement teeth waiting, meaning that at any moment, this Gryposaur may have carried more than 800 teeth.
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While the diet is unknown, given the considerable size of the creature, the massive teeth and jaws are thought to have been used to slice up large amounts of tough, fibrous plant material.

The teeth may hold important clues the dinosaur’s eating habits. The Utah museum plans to study the composition of the dinosaur teeth, which when compared to other plant-eating dinosaurs from the Kaiparowits Formation, will help researchers decipher differences in diet.
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Researchers believe the head of this particular Gryposaur likely rolled into a bend of a river, where it was partly buried. The right half of the head remained exposed to the river current, dislodging several bones before this side was buried as well.

In other parts of the monument, Utah researchers have excavated bones believed to be from the same species. Gates estimates G. monumentensis may have grown up to 30 feet long as an adult.
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In what Sampson terms “West America,” G. monumentensis and its fellow dinosaurs lived in a narrow strip of land sandwiched between the seaway to the east and rising mountains to the west. Due in large part to the presence of the seaway, the climate was moist and humid.

Thanks to more than 100 years of fossil collection, scientists know more about the Cretaceous dinosaurs from North American than they do from any other time or continent on Earth, Sampson noted.

While G. monumentensis gulped down its greens and tried to avoid predatory tyrannosaurs down in Utah, closely related but different species of duck-billed dinosaurs were doing the same thing farther north, in places like Montana and Alberta, Canada.

The new Utah species is proving crucial for determining patterns of duck-billed dinosaur evolution and ecology during the Late Cretaceous of North America, Gates said. He added that “this calls for a re-evaluation of previous ideas about the evolution of duck-billed dinosaurs across the world”.
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Bones from G. monumentensis are on display at Big Water Visitor Center in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and for a short time at the Utah Museum of Natural History before returning to the Alf Museum.
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The Era Of General Fiber Ethanol Begins

How It Works (steps and link below) - Image Credit: Range Fuels

The Era Of General Fiber Ethanol Begins

Range Fuels, a company that is in the lead on building conversion plants that can take ANY fiber material (switch grasses, chaff, wood chips, mown grass, fallen tree limbs, waste stalks from corn production as opposed to the food – corn, and etc.) and convert it to Ethanol fuel has just been selected to construct the first commercially viable “Cellulosic” based power plant by the state of Georgia.

The reason this is truly “Peachy” isn’t that Georgia is the leading producer of a nuisance waste plant - KUDZU – but that this type of Ethanol production is the path to the change over from finite fossil fuels to renewable, human produce-able fuel resource.

This type of fuel production is very efficient. Cellulosic Ethanol can contain up to 16 times more energy than is required to create it! This is quite impressive when one considers that fossil fuel gasoline contains only 5 times more energy than was required to create it … and corn or sugar based ethanol contains only 1.3 times the energy required to create it.

So, let the era of sustainable general fiber Ethanol fuel production begin!

Image Credit: Range Fuels

Excerpts from the Range Fuels website –

Range Fuels awarded permit to construct the nation’s first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant
Independence Day marks the start of our country’s independence from fossil fuels
Range Fuels News Release - Palo Alto, CA. and Broomfield, CO – July 2, 2007

Range Fuels announced today that the company was awarded a construction permit from the state of Georgia to build the first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant in the United States. Ground breaking will take place this summer in Treutlen County, Georgia for a 100-million-gallon-per-year cellulosic ethanol plant that will use wood waste from Georgia’s forests as its feedstock. Phase 1 of the plant is scheduled to complete construction in 2008 with a production capacity of 20 million gallons a year.

“We are thrilled to receive this permit and anticipate the construction of many plants throughout Georgia and the Southeast using wood waste to make ethanol,” said Mitch Mandich, CEO of Range Fuels. “With Independence Day on July 4, we are excited to begin the march toward independence from our country’s reliance on fossil fuel.”
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"The Department is pleased that the country is one step closer to making the widespread use of cellulosic ethanol a reality," U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman said. "This furthers the President's goal of deploying clean, renewable energy into the marketplace, and we are eager for the results of Range Fuels’ work, and the work of the other biorefinery grant recipients, to help increase energy security and enhance economic growth."

Range Fuels is at the forefront of new proprietary technology for producing cellulosic ethanol. While most domestic ethanol production requires corn as a feedstock, Range Fuels' proprietary process does not. The country’s ability to make corn ethanol is limited by the agricultural land available to grow it. The latest estimates predict that corn ethanol can only produce up to 15 billion gallons per year. On the other hand, the U.S. Department of Energy, in their joint report with the USDA, has identified over one billion tons of biomass annually that could be converted to biofuels, like ethanol. Range Fuels’ technology can transform all of this biomass, including wood chips, agricultural wastes, grasses, and cornstalks as well as hog manure, municipal garbage, sawdust and paper pulp into ethanol. The company has already successfully tested close to 30 types of biomass for producing ethanol.

Image Credit: Range Fuels

The company’s technology completely eliminates enzymes which have been an expensive component of cellulosic ethanol production. Range Fuels’ thermo-chemical conversion process, the K2 system, uses a two step process to convert the biomass to synthesis gas, and then converts the gas to ethanol. In addition to the ability to process a broad range of potential biomass feedstock, the K2 system benefits from a modular design.
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The company selected Georgia for its first plant based upon the abundance of forest refuse and the renewable and sustainable forest industry. The state has demonstrated great stewardship of its forest lands and environmental sensitivity. The forests of Georgia can support up to 2 billion gallons a year of cellulosic ethanol production.

Range Fuels, with Governor Perdue, announced plans to build the plant on February 7 of this year.
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Technology

Range Fuels has invented a two-step thermo-chemical process to produce cellulosic ethanol. Even if these words are foreign to you, the positives are sure to resonate: the process is self-sustaining, produces virtually no waste products, emits very low levels of greenhouse gases, and produces high yields of clean ethanol.

A Design Driven by Efficiency
Our focus on efficiency goes beyond how we produce ethanol – it also extends to where we produce it. Our distributive design lets us bring systems to sources where biomass is most plentiful, instead of having to transport biomass to a central processing site. This reduces transportation costs and related transportation fuel consumption. Our modularity also allows the system to grow as more biomass becomes available. Simply adding another module – which is easy to ship and install – immediately doubles the output. We put our systems where they are needed, in just the size that is needed.

Nature’s Way
Our entire approach is based upon the invention of eco-friendly technology. The best evidence of this is that we produce more ethanol per energy input than competing technologies. Nature likes this. Especially since everything going in is plant and waste material that serves no useful purpose. We call this conversion "waste to value," and this thrust is what motivates us to keep working our hardest.

Our Two-Step Thermo-Chemical Process

Step 1: Solids to Gas
Biomass (plant matter) that cannot be used for food and currently serves no useful purpose, such as agricultural waste, is fed into a converter. Using heat, pressure, and steam the feedstock is converted into synthesis gas (syngas), which is conditioned before entering the second step.

Step 2: Gas to Liquids
The conditioned syngas is passed over a catalyst and transformed into alcohols. These alcohols are then separated and processed to yield a variety of liquid products, specifically ethanol of a quality suitable for use in fueling vehicles.

Image Credit: Range Fuels

A Simple Process
Because Range Fuels’ process utilizes a thermo-chemical process, it relies on the chemical reactions and conversions between forms that naturally occur when certain materials are mixed under specific combinations of temperature and pressure. Other conversion processes use enzymes, yeasts, and other biological means to convert between forms.

Feedstock Flexibility
The Range Fuels process accommodates a wide range of organic feedstocks of various types, sizes, and moisture contents. This flexibility eliminates commercial problems related to fluctuations in feed material quality and ensures success in the real world, far from laboratory-controlled conditions.

Tested and True
Range Fuels’ technology has been tested and proven in bench and pilot-scale units for over 7 years. Over 8,000 hours of testing has been completed on over 20 different non-food feedstocks with varying moisture contents and sizes, including wood waste, olive pits, and more. This technology will be used in our first facility planned for a site near Soperton, Georgia.

Range Fuels K2 Process Graphically Explained Here>>

The Oblate Spheroid, An Earthworm's View - Fossil Forest Find

Trees Stuck In Time - Image Credit: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Oblate Spheroid, An Earthworm's View - Fossil Forest Find

Last week, geologists surveying a coalmine 250 feet below the current surface of the Earth's crust, came upon a preserved 300 million year old forest. Measuring over four-square miles in size, the discovery is the largest fossil forest ever to date (as mining continues, the size of the exposed fossil forest grows by the day).

The discovery of the fossil remains were in the ceiling of the coalmine and are unusual, in that the fossilized trees of a forest are still standing and preserved standing straight up, as if frozen in time.

This left lead study author Bill DiMichele, a pale botanist at the Smithsonian Institution, to observe, "We get to walk under it and look up at it," he said. "It's the earthworm's view."

Sunken Forest and Peat Cuttings - Submerged for thousands of years, and now very much visible, the Historic Sunken Forest and the Peat Cuttings on Tywyn Beach [Wales]. Not a lot is known why it is there but due to beach erosion more is showing than ever before. Image Credit: ria3 via Flickr Fossils

Excerpts from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch -

Geologists discover world's largest fossil forest in the ceiling of an Illinois coal mine
By Eric Hand - ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH - 04/24/2007

Illinois geologists have discovered the remains of one of the world's oldest tropical rainforests, preserved in the ceiling of a coal mine 250 feet below the surface.

The four-square-mile fossil forest — the largest find ever — is just south of Danville in Vermilion County, Ill., in the 300-million-year-old Herrin coal bed, a 6-foot-thick strip mined by a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Peabody Coal.

Plant fossils are common in coal beds. Coal, after all, is the compacted result of peaty plant material. But scientists are surprised by the size of this fossil bed, which they suspect came about because of a freak, fortuitous event: an earthquake that flooded and buried the forest. The vast extent of the fossil forest, which existed in a swampy time of giant dragonflies and tree ferns, has allowed the scientists to infer subtle ecological changes across the ancient landscape.

"This is almost as good as insects in amber," said Scott Elrick of the Illinois State Geological Survey and one of the authors of the study, which was published in the May issue of the journal Geology.
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These are the remnants of extinct plants from a geological period 300 million years ago, called the Carboniferous, when the world was covered in a riot of green. Illinois was near the equator and much warmer and wetter.

It was also a time before flowering plants had evolved, and so the plants would seem bizarre to modern eyes, said study co-author Howard Falcon-Lang, a geologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

"These are some of the earliest known rainforests to evolve on our planet," he said. "It was like something out of Jules Verne."

Giant tree ferns would have formed a lower canopy 30 feet high. Poking up through the ferns would have been 100-foot-tall clubmosses — asparagus-like poles that sprouted crowns full of spores. It was the age of insects, with 6-foot-long millipedes and dragonflies with yard-long wingspans.

The photo "Fosilillos" was taken next to the Bay of Biscay on the North coast near Bilbao, Spain – Image Credit: Mr. Theklan via Flickr Fossils
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An earthquake preserved all this for posterity. Elrick says it was akin to the 1811-12 earthquakes near New Madrid, Mo., which dropped a block of earth containing the Mississippi River, creating a natural dam that made Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee.

When the ancient earthquake hit, a sudden flooding in the submerged block killed the rainforest. Mud and silt rushed into the depression, preserving the stumps and logs in a layer that eventually became shale.

And that was the state of things until, 300 million years later, miners noticed shiny, funnel-shaped concretions that occasionally fell from the shale layer above them. They called them "kettlebottoms." But they were really fossilized stumps, whose roots fingered the peaty layer that ultimately became the coal seam the miners were working in.
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Lead study author Bill DiMichele, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian Institution, said the lateral extent of the fossils allowed him to notice subtle changes in species diversity as he did surveys.
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DiMichele is now doing inventories of ancient plants in two other actively mined Illinois coal seams, the Danville and the Springfield, which sit above and below the Herrin, respectively, and are separated by about a half-million years of geological time. Where most botanists do their work by walking through a forest, DiMichele takes elevators down mine shafts — to get beneath the forest.
Reference Here>>