Throwback Thursday: Discovering Copper

Copper is a metal that we are all familiar with. We use it in everyday appliances and tools without much thought about it. Who first made use of this metal?

Ancient Mesopotamians (Sumerians and Chaldeans) are credited with using copper first and bringing it to the Egyptians who really innovated it.

Ancient Egyptians ined copper from Sinai and made tools such as hoes, sickles, cookware, dishes, chisels and even mirrors.

They even made blue and green make up from copper ores, azurite and malachite.

Egyptians improved the smelting process from Mesopotamia and appear to have independently developed the same method of molding and casting that we use today. This is known as "Lost Wax Casting".

Hope you enjoyed learning some of the history of copper use. Tune in tomorrow to learn about some cool fossils replaced by a mineral other than silica or calcite. Fossilize you later!

Fossil Friday: Copper Replacement

This is petrified wood but it has not been replaced by silica like it usually would be. It has been carbonized and replaced by copper minerals. It comes from  the Nacimiento Mining District, Sandoval County, New Mexico, USA. (Incidentally, I used to live in this county when I was a child. Beautiful deserts out there).

The copper minerals came about because the environment of deposition created oxygen-reduction in a river system (lots of rotting wood and buried plant material). This caused mineral precipitation when copper-bearing water flowed through the permeable sands.

Copper minerals found in the wood at this site include malachite,

azurite,

and chrysocolla.

It is rare for fossils to be replaced with non-silica or calcite minerals but every now and then the conditions are just right to allow that to happen.

Now you know about one more way to fossilize something. Tune in Monday to learn how to find copper in the wild. Fossilize you later!

There are four types of fish scales!

The shape of a fish's caudal tail can tell you a lot about how fast the fish moves! A rounded tail is the slowest and a lunate tail is the fastest! The lunate tail has the most optimal ratio of high thrust and low draw, making it the fastest.

Ichthyology Notes 2/?

WORDPLAY WEDNESDAY

Hello my beautiful followers and happy Wednesday! Let's talk about words paleontologists use that maybe normal folk don't. Today's words are DIAGNOSTIC FEATURE.

In paleo, we use this term A LOT. It simply means that we can see a characteristic that identifies either and animal, plant, or specific body part. It can even refer to rocks! Here are a few examples:

Ammonites are identified by their suture lines. That's how we know odd-shaped ones like baculites are still ammonites.

Let's take a look at my favorite dinosaur, Stegosaurus. There are some obvious diagnostic features like the plates and the thagomizer but what if I don't have those?

Okay, let's say I'm out in the badlands of Colorado and I come across a dorsal vertebra (back vertebra). I can still still tell what dinosaur it came from.

This is a Stegosaurus dorsal vert. It is RIDICULOUSLY tall for any animal but that is a diagnostic feature...of all stegosaurs. Okay, so I've narrowed it down to a family. Here's a Kentrosaurus dorsal vert to give you an idea:

Above we have an Allosaurus dorsal vert. It looks very different than our stegosaurs, much shorter and more compact. Below is Apatosaurus' dorsal vert. It is also very tall in the neural spine. It's also like two to three times bigger than Stegosaurus. Starting to see?

To go further, I have to look at the rock and search for its diagnostic features. If the rock I am digging in looks like this:

or this:

I am in the Morrison Formation of the Late Jurassic Period...the rock formation Stegosaurus is found in. (and subsequently, Allosaurus and Apatosaurus but we already looked at the verts so we can tell them all apart if they were found altogether)

As for Kentrosaurus, I would have to be in Africa for starters so it never would have been him anyway. Now, this is way oversimplified but hopefully this gives you a better idea of how we look at multiple characters to figure out exactly what we've got.

Contrary to popular belief, not all sharks are carnivorous. The bonnethead shark (a member of the hammerhead sharks) was recently discovered to be omnivorous, including seagrass in their diet.