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Our November meeting will be on Tuesday, November 10 at the CEU Museum classroom at 7:00 p.m.

Many of you know our speaker, Shawn Duffy, who has been working in southern Utah and has been doing some interesting work related to the Permian period. Shawn has a number of slides he will show in connection with his talk which will be about the fossils and footprints of the Permian..

The following article appeared in October in the San Francisco Chronicle. Do we realize what a goldmine of fossils we have right in our own back yard?

Researchers also uncovered fossils suggesting that a toothy dinosaur migrated from Asia and evolved in the Americas into Tyrannosaurus rex, the most fearsome meat eater in history, said Richard L. Cifelli, lead author of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that will be published today.

Fossils unearthed in Emery County, Utah, are the first for terrestrial animals and plants from a historical gap that began 145 million years ago and continued until just a few million years before the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, Cifelli said.

"This gap has been like a twilight zone in the age of dinosaurs," said Cifelli. Although it was clear that great changes occurred during that gap, little was known because there were few fossils. "This is the first lighted room in a darkened house," he said.

Louis C. Jacobs, a noted dinosaur expert at Southern Methodist University, said the Utah fossil discoveries are "hugely" important because they help give a picture of the world during an unknown period.

"There were very major changes then in the ecosystems of the Earth," he said. "What they have done is to document a portion of that change for the first time and put a date on it."

Cifelli said the Utah dig uncovered more than 6,000 fossils representing

What emerges is a surprising picture, he said.

"The early dinosaurs in North America were dominated by the long-necks, the sauropods," said Cifelli. They were so common 145 million years ago, he said, "it was like it had rained sauropods over the American West."

He said the huge appetite of the sauropods had a major effect on the continent and its forests of primitive plants.

"The sauropods were so big they could go through and clear up an area," he said. "After these mowing machines went by, the flowering plants would take over the land. They are fast-growing and rapid colonizers."

But the early flowering plants grew low to the ground as shrubs and bushes. With the change in plants, said Cifelli, "the dinosaurs responded by developing new types of low level feeders."

The long-necked sauropods virtually disappeared from the fossil record, to be replaced by a weird collection of squat grazers. Some had duckbill-shaped skulls. Others had long horns and armored plates, while others had spikes of bone running down the spine.

"There was one dinosaur with a head like a bowling ball," said Cifelli "And there was one with a tail club" a tail tipped with heavy bone probably used to bash its enemies.

The ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex was found among the fossils, but there was little to suggest its evolutionary future.

Cifelli said that over millions of years, the meat eaters and the plant eaters engaged in an evolutionary "arms race," growing bigger, bonier and adding teeth. That concluded, just before the end, with Tyrannosaurus rex as "the biggest and the Badest" carnivore in the Americas, he said.

Nearly all of the dinosaurs in the new Utah find, said Cifelli, were either first seen in Asia or are descendants of dinosaurs that first arose in Asia, Cifelli said.

Utah State paleontologist, Dave Gillette has left to assume his new position in Arizona. We enjoyed having Dave share his thoughts with us at our last meeting, and wish him all the best in his new position.

Clark Warren reports that the search committee that is working on a replacement for Dave is continuing to narrow down their list and hope to have a person selected in the near future.

We only hope that his replacement will be as committed to the idea of a state volunteer organization to promote and work with our paleontological resources as Dave has been.

(And you thought the gnats at the PR2 site were bad !)

["My goodness, Harold ....Now there goes on big mosquito!"]

(Maybe this explains those unidentified bones from the PR2 site)