Peanut President posted:

you can't tip cows, they sleep lying down

quote:

Speaker Gingrich Mixes Politics and Paleontology
By Jerry Gray
Aug. 29, 1997

Somewhere short of a heat stroke, with a world-class paleontologist coaching him, a Hollywood star squatting nearby mumbling encouragement, anxious aides checking their watches and even more antsy security men on the lookout for rattlesnakes in the scrub brush, Newt Gingrich accomplished his goal: he found a dinosaur bone.

Looking like a pudgy Indiana Jones in jeans, plaid shirt and wide-brimmed hat, lugging a backpack bulging with pickax, chisels and a wisk broom, the Speaker of the House chipped away a crust of brittle stones and dried mud to expose his Jurassic treasure. He grinned broadly and proclaimed, ''I feel like a 9-year-old.''

Mr. Gingrich's bent for animals has long rivaled his passion for politics. Frequent photo sessions in his Capitol Hill office portray him holding assorted critters brought in by zoo keepers from all over the country; he reveled in a moose-watching expedition to New Hampshire two years ago and acted as ringmaster at a circus performance on the Capitol grounds in his earliest days in power. And, Mr. Gingrich said that as an adolescent, he dreamed of becoming a zoo keeper or a paleontologist.

But the Speaker took one of his oddest detours ever from politics on Wednesday, interrupting a two-week-long national tour to fulfill a lifelong fantasy, which he pursued with such dogged determination that he refused to leave the jealously guarded private site just east of Bozeman until he came up with the booty.

That took many long, hot hours, even with the assistance of Dr. John Horner, a renowned paleontologist who served as a consultant on the movie ''Jurassic Park'' and its sequel ''Lost World.'' After three hours of digging, which produced only buckets full of rubble, a slight stir was caused when the actor Peter Fonda and his wife unexpectedly appeared over the crest of a hill while hiking from their nearby ranch. Recognizing Dr. Horner and Mr. Gingrich, the Fondas marched over to greet them and watch the Speaker's uneventful progress.

''It's hot, it's windy, there's a lot of dirt, a lot of rock,'' a disappointed Mr. Gingrich told reporters as he took a long-delayed lunch break.

...
The night before, he abandoned the polemics of Capitol Hill to debate the feeding habits of Tyrannosaurus rex with Dr. Horner, a professor of paleontology at Montana State University in Bozeman. The Speaker, an ardent fan of T. rex, keeps a massive head of the beast on a shelf in his Capitol Hill offices, a cast on loan from the Smithsonian that is made from the very dinosaur that is the centerpiece exhibit at the Museum of the Rockies.

A crowd of about 200 people paid $100 apiece at a museum fund-raiser on Tuesday night to sip wine, pose for individual pictures with Mr. Gingrich and Dr. Horner and listen to them clash, sometimes tongue-in-cheek but often in serious academic discourse (between swigs of beer), over whether T. rex was a scavenger or a predator.

quote:

Newt reins himself in for final push
By JAMES HOHMANN and GINGER GIBSON 12/31/2011 04:08 PM EST
...
Of course, he’s not a completely changed man. At a town hall meeting here Saturday afternoon, Gingrich delivered his neatly segmented remarks on taxes, regulations and an overarching economy, but when asked to explain his position on global warming, he delivered a new line.

“I’m an amateur paleontologist,” Gingrich said. “I spend a lot of time looking at the Earth’s temperature for a very long time. I’m a lot harder to convince than just looking at a computer model.”

quote:

Take the last stop on Tuesday at Mabe’s Pizza in Decorah, where a woman asked if America is prepared for a pandemic.

“I honestly don’t know, and it would depend on what kind of pandemic it was,” Gingrich said.

sullat posted:

sullat posted:

My son recently dug up some dinosaur fossils. He put them together like how the skeleton must have been. What do you guys think? He thinks its a new species of T-Rex, he calls it 'Minisaurus Rex'. He wanted me to show it to some scientists, and I figure you guys are close enough.

sullat posted:

My son recently dug up some dinosaur fossils. He put them together like how the skeleton must have been. What do you guys think? He thinks its a new species of T-Rex, he calls it 'Minisaurus Rex'. He wanted me to show it to some scientists, and I figure you guys are close enough.

Lightning Knight posted:

Tell ur son that we want to see more of his paleontology digs, at his earliest convenience, please.

Pitcher Witcher posted:

Do paleontologists get guns pointed at them by dingus landowners while working on a site like my archaeologist uncle does? Or is that just because he works in Idaho? Now that I think about it does that happen outside the u.s.?

Pitcher Witcher posted:

Do paleontologists get guns pointed at them by dingus landowners while working on a site like my archaeologist uncle does? Or is that just because he works in Idaho? Now that I think about it does that happen outside the u.s.?

Flavius Aetass posted:

I know that paleontologists and archaeologists are very delicate when excavating, but how do you avoid breaking anything in the shovel/pickaxe stage before you know what's there?

Bilirubin posted:

Have a basic idea of what you are digging in.

Thing is most dinosaur digs start with bones on the surface and folks dig around it. Still, some breakage is unavoidable. Preparation is controlled destruction.

achillesforever6 posted:

A lot of skin impressions were lost because of careless excavation

Bilirubin posted:

https://twitter.com/TomHoltzPaleo/status/1258014564748349441

achillesforever6 posted:

https://twitter.com/NHMU/status/1258811526472847361

achillesforever6 posted:

https://twitter.com/NHMU/status/1258811526472847361

Bilirubin posted:

I've seen some fossil marine reptile paddles where the bones were replaced by gem quality opal.

Wait here is a whole pliosaur: https://io9.gizmodo.com/eric-the-pliosaur-one-of-the-most-interesting-fossils-5987941

Lightning Knight posted:

these kinds of fossils are probably fairly valuable, getting any of them into museums or scientific labs instead of private collections - or worse, destroyed to make jewelry - is a minor miracle I imagine

Squalid posted:

since someone mentioned paleoart and how a lot of artists depicted dinosaurs with bare exposed teeth like crocodiles, I'm going to post one of the best paleoartists, Charles R Knight. Knight produced his most famous work in the late 19th and early 20th century. Although his recreations were limited by the mainstream interpretations of dinosaur biology at the time, they were relatively pioneering in their depictions of dinosaurs as active and dynamic animals.







Besides enjoying their artistic value I think it is interesting to compare his recreations with those of later artists. It's interesting how based on our current mainstream understanding, he probably gets things right that many later recreations got wrong. For example his inclusion of gums on the above depiction of Tyrannosaurus rex, which many later artists would remove, and his attention to get the fatty and muscular tissue right to avoid the emaciated look of eighties paleoart.

While of course the depicted behavior of the two Dryptosauri in the last image I posted is speculative, I love the cat like movements he gives them. So many illustrations just have the animals staring blankly off into the distance like a bored cow, but Knight was excellent at actually giving his subjects a spark of life.

Atrocious Joe posted:

am I crazy for thinking private collections should be illegal, or at least heavily regulated and permitted? not necessarily for common stuff like invertebrates or plants, but it seems wild for rich people to buy up dinosaur fossils which the wider scientific community may never know about.

Everything about paleontology I learned from Walking with Dinosaurs and that documentary about Sue being excavated. So please tell me if this is stupid for reasons I'm not thinking of.

Lightning Knight posted:

I can't really think of a reason why not making sure fossils are held as heritage of all humankind, or what have you, and always stored in publicly owned and operated museums/research institutes, wouldn't be the correct thing to do.

Atrocious Joe posted:

am I crazy for thinking private collections should be illegal, or at least heavily regulated and permitted? not necessarily for common stuff like invertebrates or plants, but it seems wild for rich people to buy up dinosaur fossils which the wider scientific community may never know about.

sullat posted:

My son recently dug up some dinosaur fossils. He put them together like how the skeleton must have been. What do you guys think? He thinks its a new species of T-Rex, he calls it 'Minisaurus Rex'. He wanted me to show it to some scientists, and I figure you guys are close enough.