pachyrhinosaurus lakustai

Alberta teacher finds namesake in newly discovered dinosaur

By Damien Wood, THE CANADIAN PRESS

GRANDE PRAIRIE, Alta. — Waiting for the naming of the dinosaur species he discovered in the Pipestone Creek area 34 years ago, Al Lakusta said the event would bring everything full circle for him.

He had no idea, walking into Grande Prairie Regional College on Wednesday night, just how right he was.

At the public presentation, Phil Currie — research chairman of dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Alberta — revealed the name of animal as pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, after the man who discovered it.

“It probably won’t surprise most people, but hopefully it will surprise Al a little bit,” said Currie prior to the announcement.

“Having something named after you — something that’s going to be long-lasting like a dinosaur — is really a great honour. Most people don’t get that opportunity, of course, and most people that do are already dead, so they don’t know.”

Currie said naming something after a living person signifies a respect even deeper.

“Al was so wonderful in bringing this material to us in the first place and donating the initial material to the (Royal) Tyrrell Museum, that really there was no question right from the beginning that we would name it after him,” said Currie.

“We’ve known that for years, but this is it.”

Lakusta was greeted was a standing ovation as he entered the room.

“It’s hard to put into words,” said Lakusta. “It’s the culmination of 34 years waiting for something to happen — something I was trying to get going and something that Tyrrell was trying to get going … it has been a work in progress.”

Lakusta, a former earth science teacher, made the discovery on Labour Day weekend in 1974, while exploring an area he had taken his Grade 8 students to many times.

This time, however, he explored a little further along the creek bed.

First he found rib fragments, then he came across vertebrae and part of a femur.

These were identified as dinosaur bones by the Provincial Museum in Edmonton, and it sparked an urge in Lakusta to begin excavation of the site himself.

Permit issues would cut his work short about a year and a half after he started, but in 1978, the Royal Tyrrell Museum took an interest and picked up where Lakusta left off.

“Since that discovery, which as it turns out is one of the richest bonebeds in the world, other discoveries are being made now … since then we’ve had half a dozen other species at least coming out of here, and I know there will be a lot more,” said Lakusta.

“Almost everything we touch right now is going to be new stuff.”

Currie has said the site has more than 100 bones per square metre.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/Edmonton/2008/10/02/6959911.html

————————

Further Reading

History of Discovery
by Al Lakusta
http://www.riverofdeath.ca/pipestone/history.htm

Pachyrhinosaurus, “Thick-nosed Reptile”
http://www.riverofdeath.ca/pipestone/pachyrhinosaurus.htm

Discovering New Species

Quoted from Yale Environment 360

DNA Technology:

Discovering New Species

By taking bits of a single gene, scientists are using DNA barcoding to identify new species. If a portable hand-held scanning device can be developed, one ecologist says, it could “do for biodiversity what the printing press did for literacy.”

by jon r. luoma

“We just found two more!” said tropical ecologist Dan Janzen. Although the telephone connection with him was shaky, his excitement was palpable. “The first butterfly two months ago, the other just two weeks ago.”

We had reached Janzen in January at the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, a tropical forest preserve he helped create in northwestern Costa Rica, where Janzen does much of his widely lauded biodiversity research. (Among other honors, he has been awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant.) The “two more” were newly identified species of butterfly, both luminescent blue “skippers.”

Discovery of new species is reason enough for a biologist’s enthusiasm. But Janzen clearly was jazzed by something he sees as far more momentous — a technology called DNA barcoding that made these discoveries possible in the first place, and that promises to revolutionize the otherwise daunting process of identifying the millions of species on the planet, many yet unknown and unnamed.

The term “barcoding” is actually an analogy. Much the same way that a small universal product barcode allows a retailer’s scanners to distinguish a box of tissues from a can of green beans, DNA barcoding technology allows scientists to use data from a tiny snippet of a single gene to distinguish one species from the next. Although not perfect, proponents say it is highly accurate in distinguishing almost all species of animals, with a promising variation under development for plants. At a few dollars per species it is also remarkably cheap and, compared to traditional DNA analysis, lightning fast.

Eventually, it might even be possible to embed the technology into an inexpensive handheld device. When that happens, Janzen says, “it will do for biodiversity what the printing press did for literacy.” He envisions a gadget straight out of Star Trek, an electronic reader of the catalogue of life on the planet that would enable anyone — schoolteacher, farmer, curious child — to identify “what bit of biodiversity is biting them, appealing to them, worrying them” in an instant.

For now, DNA barcoding technology is limited to scientists with access to a few large labs with the right equipment. But those new butterfly species hint at the technology’s promise. The two new skipper species actually belong to a surprisingly large cluster of recently identified species that, for years, were hiding in plain sight. As recently as 2003, scientists thought that the butterflies cataloged under the name Astraptes fulgerator were all of a single species. The butterfly adults all seemed to look exactly the same, although, mysteriously, color patterns varied among their larval caterpillars. That year, Janzen, a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, gave tissue samples from dozens of butterflies his team had collected to geneticist Paul Hebert, of Ontario’s University of Guelph, who had developed the barcoding technology. His analysis quickly revealed not one, but what appear to be 10 distinct species.

The two new discoveries bring the total to 12, and there may even be a few more, Janzen says. Where science once saw a generalist species that occupied a wide variety of tropical habitats, DNA barcoding has uncovered an array of species that actually specialize and occupy differing habitats. Why all mimic the same color pattern remains a mystery, although it probably lends some sort of evolutionary advantage. Janzen thinks it’s likely a don’t-bother signal to would-be predators. Unusually fast fliers, skippers should lose any appeal to hungry birds that would learn as youngsters not to waste energy on hot pursuit of the hard-to-catch.

Beyond the arena of species discovery, the technology is rapidly finding its way into an array of practical applications, from helping health agencies to control insect-borne diseases, to helping airlines and the military avoid disastrous in-flight collisions with birds, to helping regulatory agencies monitor stream and lake quality.

Hebert says that although he’d been yearning for better ways to probe biodiversity during decades of field work in places as diverse as tropical New Guinea and the Canadian Arctic, the idea of DNA barcoding quite literally came to him as an out-of-the blue inspiration. One day in the late 1990s he was in a supermarket looking at retail barcodes when it hit.

“It occurred to me that if the retail industry can use a few numbers to represent a vast array of products, why can’t we look at DNA the same way?” he says. Herbert quickly set out to determine if he could find a genetic snippet common to all species that could yield enough information to tell them apart. He needed to find a bit of DNA small enough to be sequenced quickly. And it needed to be, like a bit of DNA Goldilocks might find, “just right.” The gene had to be one that mutates quickly enough to be distinct from that of a recent evolutionary ancestor. But it also had to mutate slowly enough that barcodes would not vary markedly within a species.

Enlarge image

Photo Credit: Suz Bateson, University of GuelphDNA barcoding revealed these look-alike blue skipper butterflies were actually two distinct species, though the pattern of their DNA compounds still had more in common with each other than with these owl species.
He found a just-right sequence on the first 648 bits of DNA of a gene called cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COX1). Each long strand of DNA contains only four nucleotides: adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine. The complex patterns in which they are arranged determine whether your eyes are blue or brown, or whether an organism is a zebra or a zebra fish. Herbert found that by simply recording the precise order of DNA compounds, called nucleotides, on the COX1 gene, he would have a de facto barcode that would define a unique species. And it turns out that a color-coded chart of a unique A, G, T, and C sequence looks enough like a supermarket barcode to make the analogy surprisingly apt. The COX1 gene works well for animal species and at least some fungi and algae. Scientists developing barcoding technology for plants now believe that they may need to use DNA from two or three genes for accurate results.

“There was a lot of skepticism that we could deliver something that actually works,” Hebert says of the years early in this decade when he was largely frustrated in attempts to find support to pursue the technology. Some traditional taxonomists, whose core work has, since the time of Linnaeus, involved close visual comparison of species, were especially skeptical. In fact, in a few cases of hybrids and of species recently evolved from others, barcoding needs to be supported by more detailed genetic analysis or visual comparison. But it is useful in enough cases, including about 98 percent of animal species, that barcoding projects are now growing explosively.

In one major effort, the Natural History Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. are collaborating on a project to barcode all of the world’s known mosquito species. That should lead to far better targeting of species that are vectors of malaria and other devastating diseases. The project, which began only in early 2007, has already solved a puzzle in South America. An apparent single species called Anopheles oswaldoi ranges across a wide area but, curiously, seemed to be a malaria vector only on some of its range. DNA barcoding revealed it to be four distinct species, only one of which appears to be a disease carrier. Future control programs can now focus on controlling the waterborne larvae of only the harmful species.

In May, 2007, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration used barcoding to issue a warning that a shipment of supposed monkfish from China actually appeared to be a species of toxic pufferfish. And the U.S. Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have helped fund a Smithsonian sponsored barcoding of all North American bird species. On the pure discovery side, the study has given scientists new leads on deciding whether some subpopulations are their own species. But the military and FAA helped fund it for more immediately practical reasons. Scientists are now using blood and tissue samples collected from aircraft to try to better understand which birds pose collision risks and where. In terms of numbers of species barcoded so far, said Hebert in January, “We’re sitting at 35,000 species, and feeling pretty happy about that.” Today, almost all barcoding is being done at a handful of labs in North America, Herbert’s own barcoding “factory” at the University of Guelph, and a facility at the Smithsonian. But he says that if funding for the new multination International Barcode of Life (iBOL) coalition comes together, 500,000 of the world’s catalogue of species could be barcoded in another five years. That would be the first step in perfecting an iPOD-like species reader that would contain a miniature DNA sequencer along with a tiny memory chip crammed with millions of barcodes, or what Herbert calls “life on the planet in a box.”

Another technological leap is likely to help. The Guelph lab recently obtained funding from the government of Canada to purchase a pair of devices that will allow DNA analysis in huge volume at blinding speeds. Conventional equipment can now provide 96 DNA “reads” in about two hours, or about 400,000 barcode records in a year. The new device can provide those 400,000 records in a single two hour run. As the equipment comes on line, Hebert envisions a new era of “environmental barcoding” that sorts out diverse assemblages of species from big unsorted samples. Picture, he says, a kilogram of insects collected from a rainforest canopy. “We can mix them into a bug milkshake,” he says, “toss them into the hopper, and tell you in a couple of hours what the 1000 species you’ve collected are. Or we could hoover up a little bit of stream bottom, and quickly tell you what species are present.”

POSTED ON 06.03.08 IN Biodiversity Science & Technology Central & South America

———————–

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jon R. Luoma, a contributing editor at Audubon, has written about environmental and science topics for The New York Times, and for such magazines as National Geographic and Discover. His third book, The Hidden Forest: Biography of an Ecosystem, has been released in a new edition by Oregon State University Press

——————-

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2019

Dating Species Splits Calibrated by Fossils

Quoted from the Science and Evolution Blogspot.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Human – Chimpanzee split occured 5-7 million years ago

Finding- New research indicates that the split between chimpanzees and humans occured 5 to 7 million years ago. This improves the time differential which previously had a 10 million year range 3-13 million years. Now the differential is 2 million years.

How it was done:

Scientists analyzed the largest data set yet of genes that code for proteins and also used an improved computational approach that they developed, which takes into account more of the variability — or statistical error–in the data than any other previous study. Gene studies are needed to address this problem because the interpretation of the earliest fossils of humans at the ape/human boundary are controversial and because almost no fossils of chimpanzees have been discovered.

The science team examined 167 different gene sequence sets from humans, chimpanzees, macaques, and mice.

No previous study has taken into account all of the error involved in estimating time with the molecular-clock method. The new statistical technique is a multifactor bootstrap-resampling approach.

Nucleotide arrangement

The scientists estimated the time of divergence between species by studying the sequential arrangement of nucleotides that make up the chain-like DNA molecules of each species. The number of mutations in the DNA sequence of a species, compared with other species, is a gauge of its rate of evolutionary change.

Calibration – rate of one species with that of another species

The minimum time of divergence

By calibrating this rate with the known time of divergence of a species on another branch of the tree-like diagram that shows relationships among species, scientists can estimate the time when the species they are studying evolved.

In this case, the calibration time the scientists used was the split of Old World monkeys — including baboons, macaques, and others — from the branch of the phylogenetic tree that led to humans and apes, which fossil studies have shown is at least 24 million years ago. Using this calibration time, the team estimated that the human-chimp divergence occurred at least 5 million years ago, proportionally about one-fifth of the calibration time.

Other supporting evidence

The maximum time of divergence

This time is consistent with the findings of several research groups that have used the molecular-clock method to estimate the split of humans and chimpanzees since the first attempt in 1967. But this is only a minimum estimate, because it was based on a minimum calibration time. To obtain a maximum limit on the human-chimp divergence, the team used as a calibration point the maximum estimate, based on fossil studies, of the divergence of Old-World monkeys and the branch leading to humans — 35 million years ago. Calculations using this date yielded a time for the human-chimp split of approximately 7 million years ago, which again was proportionally about one-fifth of the calibration time.

What else can be gathered from knowing the origin of the divergence?

Besides knowing when we divereged, a fact worth knowing, this divergence time also has considerable importance because it is used to establish how fast genes mutate in humans and to date the historical spread of our species around the globe.

Knowing the timescale of human evolution, and how we changed through time in relation to our environment, could provide valuable clues for understanding the evolution of intelligent life.

This research does not pinpoint the precise time of the split, it tells us that proportional differences on branches in family trees should be considered when proposing new times. For example, we now know that a 10-to-12-million-year human-chimp split would infer a divergence of Old World monkeys from our lineage that is too old (50-to-60-million years ago) to reconcile with the current fossil record of primates.

What then is the next step?

Although some additional improvement is possible by including more genes and more species, the greatest opportunity now for further narrowing this estimate of 5-to-7-million years will be the discovery of new fossils and the improvement in geologic dating of existing fossils.

Posted by mutley457 at 8:54 AM

Salmoninae – Subfamily within Salmonidae

The Oldest Rocks, The Pictures

See Main Post: The Oldest Rocks, so far.

The Nuvvuagittuq Belt on the coast of the Hudson Bay in Northern Quebec.
Credit: Science/AAAShttp://www.livescience.com/environment/080925-oldest-rocks.html

———————-

Richard Carlson, Geochemist, Dept. of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington

Radioactive elements trapped within zircons provide precise ages, but Dr. Carlson and his collaborators at McGill University and the University of Quebec have not found any zircons in the Quebec bedrock. Instead, they determined the age of the rocks from the amounts of neodymium and samarium, two rare earth elements.

Dr. Carlson said the skeptics might be correct that the bedrock could be younger rocks formed out of older material. “The age is pretty certain,” he said. “The interpretation of the age is less certain.”

If the rocks are as old as claimed, the significance would be that “they’re not dramatically different from rocks you would find today in Japan or places like that,” Dr. Carlson said.

In fact, their chemical signature looks most similar to ocean floor that has been pulled under continents, Dr. Carlson said. That suggests that the process of plate tectonics, reshaping and moving continents, could have already started on the very early earth.

At the very least, the existence of solid rock 4.28 billion years ago would run counter to the traditional image of the young earth as a roiling cauldron of magma oceans, a view that is falling by the wayside among researchers as more geological data is unearthed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/science/26rock.html?hp

 

——————

 

 

Don Francis, McGill Univerity 

 

—————————–

Australia’s Zircon Crystals

The bits and pieces of rocks that make up the Jack Hills rock formation are ancient—over 3 billion years old. Individual crystals of zircon within the rocks are 4.4 billion years old, only 150 million years or so younger than the age of the Earth itself. These crystals are the oldest fragments of the Earth yet found. (Photograph copyright Bruce Watson, Rensselaer)

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Zircon/

————————

 

 

 

The Oldest Rocks, so far

Supplement to this post, The Oldest Rocks – The Pictures.

Classic rock, Record-setting 4-billion-year-old rocks uncovered in Northern Quebec

ANNE MCILROY

SCIENCE REPORTER, The Globe and Mail

September 26, 2008

The oldest rocks yet found in the world lie in a weathered stretch of bedrock in Northern Quebec, and the researchers who discovered them say they offer an unprecedented glimpse of what the young Earth was like.

The rocks are 4.28 billion years old and were found on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay during the past year. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old, so the rocks have been around since roughly 300 million years after the birth of the planet, said Jonathan O’Neil, a doctoral candidate at McGill University in Montreal and the lead author of a paper to be published in today’s edition of the journal Science.

Their chemical composition offers clues about the distant past and suggests that there was liquid water on the surface back then, and that temperatures and atmospheric pressure were similar to today.

“The Earth wasn’t a glacier and it wasn’t a steam ball,” said Richard Carlson, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington and a member of a team that included Don Francis at McGill and Ross Stevenson at the University of Quebec in Montreal. The makeup of the rocks suggests that continents formed early, Dr. Carlson said. The ancient rocks resemble modern volcanic ones found in places where tectonic plates crash together, such as the Cascade mountain range that extends from southern British Columbia into the United States, or the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.

Previously, the oldest known rocks were from an outcrop known as Acasta Gneiss in the Northwest Territories, southeast of Great Bear Lake, which are four billion years old.

Tiny mineral grains within rocks in Western Australia have been dated at 4.36 billion years old. Each is about the size of a grain of sand.

“But what we have is the actual rock,” Mr. O’Neil said.

Water-soluble elements in the rocks are evidence that liquid water was present, Dr. Carlson says, and suggest that the Earth cooled from an extremely hot, molten state surprisingly quickly.

“It went from a totally molten state to something that isn’t dramatically different from today within 200 million years,” he said.

It is rare to find remnants of the early crust, he says, because most of it has been mashed and recycled into the Earth’s interior by plate tectonics.

A previous find in the same belt also added to what we know about early years on Earth. In 2001, geologists found a different type of rock in the same formation that was 3.8 billion years old.

Those rocks offered the first direct evidence that carbon dioxide – the culprit in modern, manmade global warming – might have stopped the young Earth from freezing over.

Astrophysicists believe the sun was 25 per cent fainter then, and many researchers had theorized that high concentrations of greenhouse gases helped the planet avoid global freezing. The 3.8-billion-year-old rocks contained compounds called iron carbonates, which could have been formed only if the atmosphere contained far more carbon dioxide that it does today.

Mr. O’Neil spent the last year looking at the relationships between the different types of rocks in the belt. He knew that some of the very old rocks were mixed in with much younger material.

He used a new technique for terrestrial rocks to determine that some bits of the belt were 4.28 billion years old.

Mr. O’Neil has fist-sized samples in his office. As word spreads that they are the oldest rocks in the world, he said, his colleagues have started coming by to touch them.

They are a remnant, he said, of a time when shallow seas may have lapped the shores of fledgling continents.

———————————————

Discovery of world’s oldest rocks challenged

11:28 26 September 2008

NewScientist.com news service

Catherine Brahic

A large band of ancient rocks in northern Quebec, known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt, has produced what may be the oldest rock on Earth – at 4.28 billion years old (Image: Science/AAAS)

Geologists in Canada may have discovered the oldest rocks on Earth. But a controversy over the techniques used to date the rocks is threatening to overshadow the discovery.

Finding the oldest rocks on Earth is important because they should help scientists solve one of geology’s great mysteries: how the surface of our planet was transformed from the ocean of magma that existed in the Hadean – the earliest era in Earth’s history – into the floating tectonic plates we have today.

For the last four years, Jonathan O’Neil of McGill University and colleagues have been studying a large band of ancient rocks in northern Quebec known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. However, the team has used a controversial method for dating the rocks.

The dating method relies on the amount of the common isotope neodymium-142 in the rock. All rocks contain some neodymium-142, but rocks older than 4.2 billion years should contain more of it.

That’s because it is produced by the radioactive decay of samarium-146, which had largely disappeared 4.2 billion years ago. Any rocks that formed while samarium-146 was still around would today contain larger than usual quantities of neodymium-142.

“You can precisely measure the amount of neodymium-142 and calculate a precise age for the rock,” explains O’Neil. “In our case it gave us an age of 4.28 billion years.” That’s significantly older than any rock yet found on Earth.

Moon-forming blow

This could make the greenstone belt the oldest known rocks on Earth, just 300 million years younger than our solar system. It also dates them close to the time when a massive object the size of Mars dealt Earth a glancing blow 4.53 billion years ago, knocking off the debris which formed the Moon.

The energy of the blow was such that the Earth’s upper layers melted into an ocean of magma. The next period for which we have evidence in the evolution of Earth is around 3.8 billion years ago, by which time most geologists agree plate tectonics were in place.

“What we really want to get to is what Earth looked like before 4 billion years ago,” says Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study.

“We want to understand how the early Earth transitioned from a magma ocean through to the Earth at 3.8 billion years. Somewhere in those 700 million years something changed. Any shred of evidence is important in trying to reconstruct this evolution.”

Ancient magma?

“To study how early crust formed we need to have samples of these rocks,” says O’Neil. With rocks in hand, it becomes possible to analyse every aspect of them and retrace their history. O’Neil’s latest find could help with that process.

However, the neodymium-142 levels may not be an indicator of the rock’s age. O’Neil himself admits his team may instead be measuring the age of the magma from which the rocks formed. “All rocks have precursor, something that came before they formed,” says Whitehouse.

O’Neil’s team has also used a conventional method to date the rocks which suggests the greenstone belt is only 3.8 billion years old – about 200 million years younger than the current oldest rock – Acasta gneiss, which was discovered in Canada in 1999.

It is clear that O’Neil and his colleagues have discovered one of the oldest signals from the very early stages in our planet’s development. But how the signal should be interpreted “is going to be very controversial”, says Whitehouse.

“On the weight of evidence from other studies in the area, I would still consider that 3.8 billion years is more likely the actual age of the rocks,” says Simon Wilde of the Institute for Geoscience Research in Australia.

Journal reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1161925)

———————

Canada home to world’s oldest rocks, researchers say

Friday, September 26, 2008 | 10:49 AM ET

CBC News

The Nuvvuagittuq belt region along the coast of Hudson’s Bay in Northern Quebec is the home of ancient rocks that may be as old as 4.28 billion years, according to a team of Canadian and U.S. researchers. (Science/AAAS)

Canadian and U.S. researchers say they have found the oldest rocks in the world, along the Northern Quebec coast of Hudson’s Bay.

The rocks, found in an area known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt about 40 kilometres south of Inukjuak, are estimated to be 4.28 billion years old, according to a team of researchers from McGill University, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

That would put the creation of the rocks at roughly 300 million years after the planet was formed, making them the oldest preserved piece of the Earth’s early crust, researchers said Thursday.

Jonathan O’Neil, a Ph.D. candidate at McGill’s department of Earth and planetary sciences and the lead author of a study to be published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, said the discovery would offer new insight into the early Earth.

“Our discovery not only opens the door to further unlock the secrets of the Earth’s beginnings,” said O’Neil in a statement. “Geologists now have a new playground to explore how and when life began, what the atmosphere may have looked like, and when the first continent formed.”

The rocks are known as “faux-amphibolites,” taking their name from their resemblance to another class of rocks mostly composed of silica minerals. Unlike regular amphibolites, which are dark green or pitch black in appearance, rocks in this other class are beige or sugar brown, O’Neil told CBC News.

The researchers used isotopic dating, analyzing the decay of the radioactive elements neodymium-142 and samarium-146 to determine the age of the rocks. The technique is unique because of the instability of samarium-146. Although the isotope of the element was believed to have formed in the early Earth, remnants of it are extremely rare in all but the oldest rocks because it decays so quickly. That the researchers were able to find the isotope at all told them the rock was at least four billion years old, said O’Neil.

Finding remnants of the early Earth is extremely rare, said O’Neil. The oldest previously known rocks were found in an outcrop called the Acasta Gneiss, which lies southeast of Great Bear Lake in the northwestern corner of the Canadian Shield in the Northwest Territories.

Richard Carlson, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Don Francis, a McGill professor in the department of Earth and planetary sciences, and UQAM professor Ross Stevenson were the paper’s other authors.

O’Neil said the next step is to look at the chemical composition of more samples from the same region in Northern Quebec.

“These rocks can give us clues as to how the first continents formed, but they may also tell us about atmospheric conditions and possibly the origins of life,” he said.

—————————–

Team finds Earth’s ‘oldest rocks’

By James Morgan Science reporter, BBC News Earth’s most ancient rocks, with an age of 4.28 billion years, have been found on the shore of Hudson Bay, Canada. Writing in Science journal, a team reports finding that a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone is 250 million years older than any rocks known. It may even hold evidence of activity by ancient life forms. If so, it would be the earliest evidence of life on Earth – but co-author Don Francis cautioned that this had not been established. “The rocks contain a very special chemical signature – one that can only be found in rocks which are very, very old,” he said. The professor of geology, who is based at McGill University in Montreal, added: “Nobody has found that signal any place else on the Earth.” “Originally, we thought the rocks were maybe 3.8 billion years old. “Now we have pushed the Earth’s crust back by hundreds of millions of years. That’s why everyone is so excited.” Ancient rocks act as a time capsule – offering chemical clues to help geologists solve longstanding riddles of how the Earth formed and how life arose on it. But the majority of our planet’s early crust has already been mashed and recycled into Earth’s interior several times over by plate tectonics. Before this study, the oldest whole rocks were from a 4.03 billion-year-old body known as the Acasta Gneiss, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The only things known to be older are mineral grains called zircons from Western Australia, which date back 4.36 billion years. Date range Professor Francis was looking for clues to the nature of the Earth’s mantle 3.8 billion years ago. He and colleague Jonathan O’Neil, from McGill University, travelled to remote tundra on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay, in northern Quebec, to examine an outcrop of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. They sent samples for chemical analysis to scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who dated the rocks by measuring isotopes of the rare earth elements neodymium and samarium, which decay over time at a known rate. The oldest rocks, termed “faux amphibolite”, were dated within the range from 3.8 to 4.28 billion years old. “4.28 billion is the figure I favour,” says Francis. “It could be that the rock was formed 4.3 billion years ago, but then it was re-worked into another rock form 3.8bn years ago. That’s a hard distinction to draw.” The same unit of rock contains geological structures which might only have been formed if early life forms were present on the planet, Professor Francis suggested. Early habitat? The material displays a banded iron formation – fine ribbon-like bands of alternating magnetite and quartz. This feature is typical of rock precipitated in deep sea hydrothermal vents – which have been touted as potential habitats for early life on Earth. “These ribbons could imply that 4.3 billion years ago, Earth had an ocean, with hydrothermal circulation,” said Francis. “Now, some people believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria. “If that were true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life. “But if I were to say that, people would yell and scream and say that there is no hard evidence.” Fortunately, geologists have already begun looking for such evidence, in similar rocks found in Greenland, dated 3.8 billion years. “The great thing about our find, is it will bring in people here to Lake Hudson to carry out specialised studies and see whether there was life here or not,” says Francis. “Regardless of that, or the exact date of the rocks, the exciting thing is that we’ve seen a chemical signature that’s never been seen before. That alone makes this an exciting discovery.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7639024.stm ————————-   The rocks contain structures which might indicate life was present The rocks turned out to be far older than first thought

 

—————————–

National Science Foundation

http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=112299&org=NSF&from=news

Press Release 08-165
Oldest Known Rock on Earth Discovered

 

Bedrock in Canada is 4.28 billion years old

 

 

 

 

Canadian bedrock more than 4 billion years old may be the oldest known section of the Earth’s early crust.

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and McGill University in Montreal used geochemical methods to obtain an age of 4.28 billion years for samples of the rock, making it 250 million years more ancient than any previously discovered rocks.

The findings, which offer scientists clues to earliest stages of our planet’s evolution, are published in this week’s issue of the journal Science.

“This research highlights the ways in which new instrumentation [a thermal ionization mass spectrometer, or TIMS] enables the collection of new data–data which lead to major scientific discoveries,” says David Lambert, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.

The Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt is an expanse of bedrock exposed on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec and was first recognized in 2001 as a potential site of very old rocks.

Samples of the Nuvvuagittuq rocks were analyzed by geologists Jonathan O’Neil of McGill University and Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

By measuring minute variations in the isotopic composition of the rare earth elements neodymium and samarium in the rocks, O’Neil and Carlson determined that the rock samples range from 3.8 to 4.28 billion years old.

The oldest dates came from rocks termed “faux amphibolite,” which the researchers interpret to be ancient volcanic deposits.

“There have been older dates from Western Australia for isolated resistant mineral grains called zircons,” says Carlson, “but these are the oldest whole rock dates yet.”

The oldest zircon dates are 4.36 billion years.

Before this study, the oldest dated rocks were from a body of rock known as the Acasta Gneiss in the Northwest Territories, which are 4.03 billion years old.

Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and remnants of its early crust are extremely rare–most of it has been mashed and recycled into Earth’s interior several times over by plate tectonics since the planet formed.

The rocks are significant not only for their great age but also for their chemical composition, which resembles that of volcanic rocks in geologic settings where tectonic plates are crashing together. “This gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the processes that formed the early crust,” says Carlson.

The research was also supported by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

-NSF-

Media ContactsCheryl Dybas, NSF (703) 292-7734 cdybas@nsf.gov
Alan Cutler, CIW (202) 939-1142 acutler@ciw.edu

 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of $6.06 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to over 1,900 universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 45,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes over 11,500 new funding awards. NSF also awards over $400 million in professional and service contracts yearly.

Useful NSF Web Sites:

NSF Home Page: http://www.nsf.gov

NSF News: http://www.nsf.gov/news/
For the News Media: http://www.nsf.gov/news/newsroom.jsp
Science and Engineering Statistics: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/
Awards Searches: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/

http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=112299&org=NSF&from=news

 

 

 

 

 

COLOR

BY MRS. S. V. SUTHERLAND.

CHRIST is the true light, the great source from which the sun borrows its splendor; and all things that he has made, reflect some of that light. The grass does not reflect all, but only the green rays, the rose reflects the red ; the forget-me-not the blue,—all telling us of him who is the Light, the One altogether lovely- All things were made beautiful for our pleasure and for our good. He who is unmindful of the glory of the sunset, the delicate tinting of the rose petal, and the purity of the lily, is neglecting the means by which God would make him purer and finer, and lift him nearer heaven.

An appreciation of color grows with study and observation. It is the mother’s privilege to develop a refined taste, and an appreciation of the beautiful, by calling the attention of her child to the beautiful color of the flowers, the tinting of the leaves, and the colors in the clouds. Nature’s coloring will be found much different from the glaring poster and the cheap chromo ; and the child that has been educated to love and appreciate the rich colors and delicate shadings of the pansy, will not be attracted by that which is only gaudy and coarse. The young person who desires flashy dress, has been educated by the cheap fashion plate and the bill board, and not by God’s beautiful, living pictures. If you find that your child does not love out-of-door life and the things of nature as much as you wish, begin to cultivate in yourself a love of these things. Call his attention to the soft green of the willows by the river, the beautiful reflections in the water, the glossy, dark green of the oak, the effects produced by sunshine and shadow, causing leaves which are really the same color to appear yellow in the sun and almost black in the shade. When he learns to look for beauty in these things, a new world is open to him, —God’s beautiful world.

Color has a psychic effect that is not appreciated nor turned] to account as it should be. When your child is nervous and cross, or unduly excited, induce him to lie down and look up into the blue sky. Children like to watch the clouds if their attention is called to them. No fit of sulks can outlive an interested look into the blue sky. Blue is the peace color, and is conducive to mental calm. God had a purpose in covering us with the blue sky. Why not take advantage of this, mothers and teachers? When tired and impatient, go out of doors for a few moments and look up. Your spirits will follow the look.

Nothing need be said to the observant concerning- the mental effect of red. Show a red rag to a turkey-gobbler or a ferocious animal, and note the result.

Not long ago in a state of physical weariness and mental depression, I went for a ride into the country. The trees were in their gorgeous autumnal dress. Unconsciously I began to notice the color effects of the orange and brown beech standing by the scarlet maple, the mixtures of green and gold, of red and brown. I soon found myself singing, and thanking God for his love. The depression did not return although it had been combated by the will for days, and physical weariness was for- gotten.

Autumn is the season of yellow and gold, and should be spent out of doors. I cannot look upon a mass of yellow flowers and be unhappy. Neither can you. Try it.

THE ADVOCATE, November, 1901, Volume 3, No. 9, p. 298

May 14 and 15

Blackburnian Warbler, saw, heard
Scarlet Tanager, heard
Chimney Swift, heard
Black and White Warbler?, heard
Rose-breasted Grosbeak, heard
Catbird, heard
Turkey Vulture, flying low over school grounds.
Two Chipping Sparrows mating near chapel entrance.

Early 15th, Cardinal and Robin dominate the sound waves.

May 14, 2008, (up to)

The Robin’s eggs hatched sometime Monday (11th), or earlier.
A dead Black-throated Blue Warbler lay on the ground nearby.
Chimney Swifts heard several days ago.
A woodcock performed this evening.
White-crowned Sparrows sing conspicuously.
Spotted Sandpiper called from the ploughed fields.
An owl? uttered one syllable shrieks a night ago.

Up to Sunday, May 11

Rose-breasted Grosbeaks arrived last Wednesday, I think. First their warbled song, then two appeared at the next door neighbor’s feeder. Warbling birds were noted in the woods nearby. On Sabbath, White-crowned Sparrows showed themselves. They appear a stately sparrow. The churrup of the Oriole was heard as well. Scores of gulls have been counted. Last night, a strange brief gull-like scratchy screech was heard. It called several times. Its very last call seemed different than the others. I listened at my bedroom window for some time, wondering.

Today, Sunday, the wind blows and blows like it is bringing in an enormous storm.