Delusions of Grandeur

This is a blog of happenings in my family, with my kids, and with the politics of the world. If you don't get satire you should probably stop reading right now. I tend to ramble on, and on, and on...
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30 August 2012

I am what you might call an amateur geologist. I took a geology course my first semester at Georgia Tech and it sparked a lifelong interest. Our first roadtrip had a geologically-themed goal (Dinosaur National Monument) and it's a trend we've continued with trips to places like Yellowstone, the Bay of Fundy, the Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain National Park, the Badlands, the Arctic Watershed, the Black Hills, Mammoth Cave and, most recently, Niagara Falls. I even spend two weeks in the field in Colorado visiting most of the major formations exposed at the surface there.

Mesozoic paleontology has fascinated me even longer (really, who isn't into dinosaurs?), but I always thought of the Cenozoic as being rather dull. Dull, that is, until about 5 years ago a YouTube compatriot bought me a book by Paul Martin for my birthday. It really opened my eyes. Henceforth we've added tapir fossil sites, mammoth digs and rhino excavations to our destinations. So does that make me an amateur vertebrate paleontologist, too? Well, I sure liked to think so...

Well, yesterday I found a large skull fragment (pictured above) exposed in a creekbank near my house. Awesome, right? Looking at it I could see a turtle's head, complete with nostril holes. And it was huge: 21 cm by 16 cm. The skull wasn't fossilized, so I new it must be Cenozoic in origin (bones at the Mammoth Site in South Dakota aren't fossilized either). I started looking up turtles and tortoises and soon realized that this skull was much bigger that any living species. This was exciting! I started looking for vertebrate paleontologists to contact with my find. I wanted to calculate how big this tortoise must have been so I started looking at skull/carapace ratios. There was some variation, so I started looking at skulls to try and narrow it down to a similar species. I couldn't find any that looked like my skull. In fact they all had single large openings for the nasal passages. Then I started to realize that I just might be that over-excited amateur paleontologist that thinks the first bone he finds is a great discovery. There are cattle near my house, upstream of the bank where I found the skull fragment, so I looked up cow skulls. The bone fusion lines, eye ridges, indentations and overall shape matched. Well, maybe it matches a bison a little better, but those were all over this area when Americans started crossing the Appalachians anyways.I was disappointed, but really glad that I hadn't hurried to send an email off to some poor vertebrate paleontologist. I wonder how many emails they get from yahoos like me.


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Last modified on 2 Sept 2012 by Bradley James Wogsland.
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