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The Big Dinosaur Dig Free FREE THE BIG DINOSAUR DIG PDF Esther Ripley | 48 pages | 21 Sep 2009 | DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley) | 9780756655952 | English | New York, NY, United States The Big Dinosaur Dig (DK READERS) - It's been million years since the last Jurassic dinosaurs roamed the planet. Millennia have The Big Dinosaur Dig and today on the prairies of northern Wyoming, USA, it is hot and arid. At a glance, away from the isolated towns, the landscape is devoid of The Big Dinosaur Dig save juniper, sagebrush and the occasional rattlesnake or black widow spider. But evidence of a prehistoric world filled with lush greenery, dinosaurs and a variety of other extinct animals are just below the rocky surface. In summerscientists from the Natural History Museum, Londonset out for Wyoming to help reveal what has been hidden for millions of years. Dinosaurs that lived during the Jurassic Period around million years ago are arguably some of the world's best known. They include DiplodocusStegosaurus and Allosaurus - or, as Museum dinosaur researcher Dr Susannah Maidment puts it, 'all of the ones you knew when you were seven'. But there is still plenty about these widely recognised animals and the world they lived in The Big Dinosaur Dig we don't fully understand. The first team from the Museum to arrive in Wyoming inled by Prof Paul Barrett, marked crossing the state border with a photo. Mission Jurassic is a project led by the Children's The Big Dinosaur Dig of Indianapolis, which aims not only to dig up dinosaur fossils for display, but also to learn as much as possible about what western North America was like million years ago. Two teams from the Natural History Museum joined the project in to help explore the The Big Dinosaur Dig Mile - a square mile in northern Wyoming - bringing along experts in fossil preparation, microvertebrates, palaeobotany, fossil fish and marine invertebrates. After two weeks on site, a second group from the Museum, led by Dr Susannah Maidment, took over from Prof Barrett and his team. Prof Barrett says, 'All of the Mission Jurassic partners brought with them people who are either specialists in different scientific areas or have expertise in doing these kinds of excavations. From approximately million years ago, a shallow sea known as the Sundance Sea covered much of western North America. It was connected to the ocean by a narrow channel that stretched north for over a thousand miles. As this sea withdrew, it was replaced by rivers and floodplains which deposited sediments and formed the rocks known as the Morrison Formation. Today only a small amount of this approximately 1. The Morrison Formation yellow stretches across roughly 1. The two dinosaur footprints on the map represent the The Big Dinosaur Dig location The Big Dinosaur Dig the Jurassic Mile in Wyoming orange. Dr Maidment says, 'During the Late Jurassic Period, about million years ago, this area of Wyoming was a broad, shallow plain inhabited by dinosaurs like StegosaurusDiplodocus and Allosaurus. There were forests and plants - it would have been quite a green landscape. On the Jurassic Mile, evidence of these prehistoric reptiles is scattered across the landscape, with fossilised bones naturally weathering out of rocks and tumbling down the hillsides almost everywhere you look, and even more being slowly dug out of two quarries. The Jurassic Mile is exceptionally rich in dinosaur fossils and the teams found lots of evidence of bones across the site. As well as the dinosaur- bearing Morrison Formation rocks, a large swathe of rocks laid down by the earlier sea are also exposed. Some of the rocks of the Sundance Formation were deposited within a calm lagoon in exceptionally thin layers called paper shales. Palaeontologists can gently tease the layered rocks apart by hand or with tools to find The Big Dinosaur Dig and ancient animals, such as small fish and insects, fossilised The Big Dinosaur Dig them. Fossil fish curator Emma Bernard says, 'The rock is very finely laminated. It's almost like the pages of a book. So we had to be really careful when we were excavating. The team also found abundances of belemnites, Gryphaea and oysters at different layers within the Sundance Formation, providing evidence of different marine environments. Fossil invertebrates curator Dr Tim The Big Dinosaur Dig explains, 'Oysters are strange animals that can live in parts of the sea that other animals find difficult, whether because of the salinity, temperature The Big Dinosaur Dig even the roughness of the water. As they are one of the few organisms capable of tolerating extreme environments and grow quite quickly, oysters can dominate an area. You can end up with very thick beds of oysters. The accumulations of different fossils found throughout the Sundance Formation, on the Jurassic Mile and elsewhere, provide evidence that sea levels and conditions changed considerably over time. In one layer of the Sundance Formation, the team came across thousands of Gryphaea carpeting The Big Dinosaur Dig hillside. These now-extinct animals are also known as devil's toenails. Dinosaur hunting can be quite low-tech. Palaeontologists can spend hours walking through a site and staring at the ground, searching for clues that a dinosaur might be hidden in the rocks below. We don't just go outside and find beautiful skeletons lying on the surface. It takes The Big Dinosaur Dig bit of practice,' says Prof Barrett. Bernard explains, 'Sometimes it can be tough to tell a rock from a fossil, and you have to really get your eye in. But one of the best ways to tell is to try and find anything black and shiny in the rock - that can often be a good indication of a tooth or scale. Although the The Big Dinosaur Dig experts are seasoned professionals, finding a fossil in the field is still an exciting experience. But there are more than just dinosaurs in the Morrison Formation. Finding fossilised plants could help scientists to understand more about Jurassic ecosystems. Palaeobotanist Dr Paul Kenrick explains, 'One of the really nice things about the Jurassic Mile is that you've got the bones of dinosaurs together with the plants. That really gives us the context of where these animals lived. You commonly get leaves and fossilised wood. But one of the most common you can't actually see in the field - these are pollen grains and spores, which you have to take back to the lab and dissolve the rock. Plant life in Morrison time would have been much more productive than what is found in the semi-desert conditions of Wyoming today. There would have been predominantly tall conifers with an understory of ferns and small shrubs, as grass and flowering plants hadn't evolved million years ago. The Big Dinosaur Dig dinosaurs like Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus were huge animals. Understanding the The Big Dinosaur Dig these herbivores would have relied on The Big Dinosaur Dig help scientists to answer key questions, such as how these reptiles were able to grow to their colossal sizes. Although palaeontologists know that the rocks of the Jurassic Mile are around million years old, determining a more specific age is challenging - but that's exactly what Dr Maidment intends to do. In marine sediments, scientists can use fossilised microscopic organisms to correlate rocks from one place to another, sometimes accurately determining their age. But because the Morrison sediments were laid down on land, this approach won't work. But that's also difficult because there's not very much ash here,' explains Dr Maidment. Dr Maidment uses a hand lens to get an up-close look at a rock sample from The Big Dinosaur Dig bottom of the Morrison Formation. Instead she and PhD student Joe Bonsor have logged the style of sediments to help compare the terrestrial rocks to those in other The Big Dinosaur Dig. Bonsor says, 'We want to work out the geological history of the area. We want to know what the environment was like when the dinosaurs lived all those millions of years ago. We then piece all The Big Dinosaur Dig that together and that feeds into the wider picture'. The Jurassic Mile has been explored by the Children's Museum in previous years. When Prof Barrett and his crew arrived in Wyoming intheir first job was to begin clearing the site, which had spent the winter buried under a protective layer of rocks. Prof Barrett says, 'We got into the quarries and started shifting rock and sweeping down the surfaces so that we could see The Big Dinosaur Dig was The Big Dinosaur Dig on. Once they had reached the bone bed, they slowed down and began to painstakingly reveal ancient animals millimetre by millimetre - a job Dr Maidment and her crew continued when they arrived on site two weeks later. Mark Graham is the Natural History Museum's senior The Big Dinosaur Dig preparator. His day-to-day role involves working with the fossils that palaeontologists bring back from expeditions. But on Mission Jurassic, he got to dig The Big Dinosaur Dig the bones himself. He says, 'It was fantastic on the first day to uncover a scapula of one of these gigantic dinosaurs, and later to find a large claw bone. So exposing and stabilising them in the quarry is a slight role reversal for me. Finding large The Big Dinosaur Dig bones isn't easy, but it's nothing compared to uncovering those of smaller animals, such as amphibians and mammals, which lived alongside them. Finding microvertebrates is an important part of understanding what the environment would have been like in a particular area millions of years ago.
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