Community Chat

[Noel7]

The Washington Post has a great article on a recent find, the story is amazing!  It kept me awake last night, even waking my husband to tell him and ask, how do you wrap your head around 110 million years?

I'm sure some of you have kids or grandkids with a love of dinosaurs. You might want to tell them about this find   Sorry, I can't post the link, but you can google it, it came out today and the writing is almost like poetry.

**************************************************************************

"...on a summer day in 2012, a self-taught fossil hunter named Ray Stanford noticed the unmistakable shape of the nodosaur’s track as he drove out of a parking lot at what is now NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt."

"Some 110 million years ago, in the swamp that would become the Washington suburbs, a hulking, armored nodosaur trudged along a riverbank, leaving a telltale print in the mud. Its offspring scrambled after it, slipping in the parent's print. Other dinosaurs crowded the setting: A long-necked sauropod squelched through the muck, while several theropods — smaller cousins of the fearsome T-rex — stalked the landscape. Perhaps they were in pursuit of the small, rodent-like creatures hopping about."

"Within days, a flood covered the many footprints with rock, preserving them. Millennia passed. An asteroid struck, the continents shifted, sea levels fell, mammals rose..."

"Years of excavation and analysis revealed the contours of that fossil print and dozens more on a single 8.5-foot-long slab of sandstone, Stanford and his colleagues announced Wednesday. It is the largest and most diverse assemblage from the dinosaur age found in the Mid-Atlantic region — and it ranks among the best fossil trackways in the world."

[Noel7]

Prints of a baby and adult nodosaur are among dozens of tracks found at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

[Noel7]

[ALRATIBA]

OOOPs!  I thought this was about some of the politicians!

[Eileen in Virginia]

I saw the story on the news this morning. Very cool!

[deepwaterdotter]

"Oh, no, they say he's got to go

Go, go, Godzilla!

History shows again and again

How nature points out the folly of man

Godzilla!" - Blue Oyster Cult 

[Noel7]

I asked DH if he knew how old the earth is and he called it!  I started to wonder about the time spans last night.  Here's what I found out today:

"Since the planet Earth doesn't have a birth certificate to record its formation, scientists have spent hundreds of years struggling to determine the age of the planet. By dating the rocks in the ever-changing crust, as well as neighbors such as the moon and visiting meteorites, scientists have calculated that Earth is 4.54 billion years old, with an error range of 50 million years."

space.com