Category: Fossils & Ruins

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Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News

Nat’l Geographic: One of Earth’s most dangerous supervolcanoes is rumbling

Italy’s Campi Flegrei may be awakening from a long slumber, scientists warn.

Vulcanologist James E. Quick, SMU’s associate vice president for research and dean of Graduate Studies, is quoted for his expertise in the magazine National Geographic.

Quick, a geologist in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, is quoted in “One of Earth’s most dangerous supervolcanoes is rumbling.” The article was published Dec. 23, 2016.

An expert in volcano hazards, Quick is an expert in geologic science and volcano risk assessment, particularly the study of magmatic systems. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 2009 Quick led the international scientific team that discovered a 280-million-year-old fossil supervolcano in the Italian Alps. The supervolcano’s magmatic plumbing system is exposed to an unprecedented depth of 25 kilometers, giving scientists new understanding into the phenomenon of explosive supervolcanos.

Italian geologists in 2010 awarded Quick the Capellini Medal to recognize the discovery. In 2013 an area encompassing the supervolcano won designation as the Sesia-Val Grande Geopark by the UNESCO Global Network of National Geoparks.

Prior to SMU, Quick served a distinguished 25-year scientific career with the USGS, including as program coordinator for the Volcano Hazards Program.

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By Brian Clark Howard
National Geographic
A long-quiet yet huge supervolcano that lies under 500,000 people in Italy may be waking up and approaching a “critical state,” scientists report this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Based on physical measurements and computer modeling, “we propose that magma could be approaching the CDP [critical degassing pressure] at Campi Flegrei, a volcano in the metropolitan area of Naples, one of the most densely inhabited areas in the world, and where accelerating deformation and heating are currently being observed,” wrote the scientists—who are led by Giovanni Chiodini of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics in Rome.

A sudden release of hot magmatic gasses is possible in the near future, which could trigger a large eruption, the scientists warn. Yet the timing of any possible eruption is unknown and is currently not possible to predict….

The scars of another supervolcano were recently found in the Sesia Valley in the Italian Alps. That eight-mile-wide caldera likely last erupted 280 million years ago, when it blasted out a thousand times more material than Mount St. Helens spewed during its infamous 1980 eruption. The result was the blocking out of the sun, which led to global cooling.

“There will be another supervolcano explosion,” scientist James Quick, a geologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, said in a statement when that volcano was found.
“We don’t know where, [but] Sesia Valley could help us to predict the next event.”

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Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins Researcher news

The making of Maori society: An archaeological analysis of social networks

SMU archaeologist Mark D. McCoy has been awarded a grant to collaborate with other researchers on how New Zealand’s Māori society developed.

McCoy is working with Thegn Ladefoged, University of Auckland, New Zealand, to reconstruct ancient systems of inter-iwi trade and contact by looking at the physical evidence of everyday life — tracing when and where ancient tools made from obsidian moved throughout New Zealand.

An expert in landscape archaeology and monumental architecture and ideology in the Pacific Islands, McCoy is an associate professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology.

“One of the most exciting things about this project is we have the opportunity to add a new dimension to the rich history of Māori society that we already know from oral histories passed down over about 20 generations, stretching back to the first people to arrive in New Zealand around A.D. 1250,” McCoy said. “Those histories describe the confederation of families and villages into larger tribal identities that have carried on to the modern day.”

By working in collaboration with contemporary Māori, the researchers hope to learn what happened over the years to shape the kind of society that early European visitors encountered when they began to regularly visit New Zealand in the late 1700s, he said.

“I think this is especially relevant to the modern world where it is easy to think of social networks as a by-product of living in a digital age, when in fact social networks have always been part of the human experience and likely tell us a great deal about how we see ourselves and our place in the world,” McCoy said.

The project is funded by The Marsden Fund, which was established by the government of New Zealand in 1994 to fund fundamental research. New Zealand’s equivalent to the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation, The Marsden Fund is administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

The new project integrates science, archaeology and local knowledge on a rarely seen scale, making it one of the most unique and exciting Marsden-funded projects in recent years, according to a statement from the Royal Society of New Zealand.

“No culture is socially static. Over several centuries, the Polynesian colonists who settled New Zealand began to create a new type of society. Relatively autonomous village-based groups transformed into larger territorial hapū lineages, which later formed even larger iwi associations,” the statement reads.

Traditionally, information passed down through the generations by word of mouth has provided the best evidence of these complex, dynamic changes in social organization. However, the novel Marsden-funded project will use archaeological evidence to examine how social networks beyond the village changed as Māori society developed.

By combining traditional archaeological techniques, sophisticated Geographical Information System analyses and social network analysis modelling with local iwi input, the team led by McCoy and Ladefoged will gain new insights into how Māori society emerged and flourished in the past.

Proposed experiments will use obsidian hydration dating as a method for determining the age of New Zealand artifacts. This collaborative research will also connect or reconnect Māori with their taonga held in museums and university archaeology collections.

Recently McCoy published findings uncovered as part of a National Geographic expedition to more accurately date the age of Nan Madol, an ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean with a monumental tomb said to belong to the first chief among the islands. — The Royal Society and SMU

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Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News

LiveScience: Tough Turtle — Dino-Killing Asteroid Spared Sea Creature

“If these sea turtles do, in fact, form a tightly knit group, evolutionarily speaking, the [African] specimen provides proof that members of that group survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.” — Timothy Myers, SMU

Live Science Senior Writer Laura Geggel covered the research of paleontologist Timothy Scott Myers, a postdoctoral researcher in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

Myers analyzed an ancient sea turtle, discovered in Angola in 2012, with a triangular-shaped head that lived about 64 million years ago and that is closely related to earlier sea turtles that lived before scientists think an asteroid smashed into the earth sparking a massive mass extinction event.

The article “Tough Turtle: Dino-Killing Asteroid Spared Sea Creature,” cites new findings from Myers’ research, which studied the specimen. It was found along sea cliffs near the town of Landana, in the Angolan province of Cabinda in June 2012.

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By Laura Geggel
Live Science
Shortly after an asteroid smashed into Earth about 65.5 million years ago, obliterating much of life on Earth,an ancient sea turtle with a triangular-shaped head swam along the relatively arid shores of southern Africa, a new study finds.

The creature, a newly identified species, lived about 64 million years ago during the Paleocene, an epoch within the Paleogene period, the researchers said. The animal is closely related to earlier sea turtles that lived before the asteroid struck, an event known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, which marks the mass extinction that killed about 75 percent of all species on Earth, including the nonavian dinosaurs.

“If these sea turtles do, in fact, form a tightly knit group, evolutionarily speaking, then the [African] specimen provides proof that members of that group survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous,” study lead researcher Timothy Myers, a research assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Texas, told Live Science in an email.

Paleontologists found the specimen along the sea cliffs near the town of Landana, in the Angolan province of Cabinda in June 2012. Study senior researcher Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University, noticed part of the bone protruding from the rock. He and his team soon realized it was a nearly complete turtle skull and most of a hyoid, a U-shaped neck bone that supports the tongue.

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Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News

Radio New Zealand: New research sheds more light on ancient Pacific site

New research has pinpointed the date construction started on an ancient abandoned city in the Federated States of Micronesia and could eventually help shed light on other societies in the region.

Radio New Zealand covered the research discovery of SMU archaeologist Mark D. McCoy. The new uranium series dating on the stone buildings of the ancient monumental city of Nan Madol suggests the ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean was the earliest among the islands to be ruled by a single chief, McCoy found.

The article, “New research sheds more light on ancient Pacific site,” published Oct. 26, 2016.

McCoy led the discovery team. The discovery was uncovered as part of a National Geographic expedition to study the monumental tomb said to belong to the first chief of the island of Pohnpei. McCoy deployed uranium series dating to determine that when the tomb was built it was one-of-a-kind, making it the first monumental scaled burial site on the remote islands of the Pacific.

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Radio New Zealand
The 98 man-made islets of Nan Madol on Pohnpei housed the tombs and ceremonial centre of the island’s Saudeleur rulers hundreds of years ago.

The 83 hectare site, which received UNESCO World Heritage status in July, is made up of impressive stone monuments linked by a network of canals in a lagoon on the south-east side of Pohnpei.

One of the researchers involved in the study, archaeologist Mark McCoy, said advances in technology enabled the team to date the architectural stone and coral from the tomb of the first chief of the entire island.

“What I was able to do with this particular research was to be able to say quite precisely that the major monumental burial at the site of Nan Madol dates to around 1180 to 1200 AD which makes it the earliest construction of its type by at least a century for the Pacific islands.”

Using x-ray fluorescence technology, the team tested the chemistry of the massive stones and discovered it came from the opposite side of Pohnpei.

Different technology was used to date the tonnes of crushed coral also used in construction.

Dr McCoy said Nan Madol’s exact engineering was still a mystery but he said the stones were probably dragged around the island from their source.

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Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News

D Magazine: The Trinity Project — More About Bones

Answers to these questions can be supplied in part because there’s a fossil record, thanks to the efforts of Winkler, Slaughter, and Ellis W. Shuler, the person for whom the museum is named.

Journalist Laray Polk wrote about the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at SMU in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences as part of an essay on The Trinity Project and prehistoric bones native to the Dallas area.

The article, “The Trinity Project: More About Bones,” published Oct. 11, 2016.

Dale Winkler, director of the museum, showed Polk around the museum’s collections relevant to the article.

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By Laray Polk
D Magazine
In addition to Pioneer Cemetery, there’s another quiet space in Dallas that holds the bones of ancestors: the Shuler Museum of Paleontology, located on the SMU campus. The Shuler Museum has no fully assembled skeletons of prehistoric carnivores on premises or other dazzling displays (though the day I visited, there was a stack of giant turtle shells in plaster jackets in the hallway, outside the entrance). For one, the museum is a shoebox of a space located on the basement floor of the Earth Sciences building. There isn’t the room for that sort of thing. Second, the fossils here function as teaching and research collections. A casual visit from a non-expert like me requires an appointment and a great amount of patience from the host, which I received in abundance from vertebrate paleontologist and museum director Dale A. Winkler.

The museum is arranged library-style with mastodon tusks and similar large bones laid out neatly on gray industrial shelving, while smaller specimens — teeth, small bone, shell, scute, and more — are held in cabinets with pullout trays lined in soft material and organized by collection. The occasion for my visit was to view those specimens described by Bob H. Slaughter and others in the 1962 report “The Hill-Shuler Local Faunas of the Upper Trinity River, Dallas and Denton Counties, Texas.”

My questions, then as now, are basic: what kinds of animal roamed the area now known as the Great Trinity Forest? What kinds of plants and trees were present? What was the climate like? How was the Trinity River floodplain formed?

Answers to these questions can be supplied in part because there’s a fossil record, thanks to the efforts of Winkler, Slaughter, and Ellis W. Shuler, the person for whom the museum is named. Shuler was hired by SMU in 1915, the year it opened, to teach geology and related courses. He served as head of the Geology Department and Dean of Graduate Studies until his retirement, in 1953.

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