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Now that summer is here, our monthly meetings will move to the outdoors. Our July meeting will be held on Tuesday July 14. We will meet at the CEU Museum and leave from there at 5:30 PM to go out to an invertebrate fossil site near Castledale. John Bird will direct us to a site where we should be able to collect a variety of specimens including ammonites, cephalopods, scaphites, pelecypods, etc.

Bring your digging tools, some water, bug spray and a bite to eat for when the digging ends. We will look forward to having a fun time and hope that many of you can join the group on our first summer field trip.

But for the first time, Chin has now identified a king-size coprolite from a theropod, almost surely a tyrannosaurus, one of the meat-eating dinosaur group that scavenged o n dead bodies or hunted live beasts and ferociously devoured them.

In a report published Thursday in the British scientific journal Nature, Chin and her colleagues say they have established that the powerful jaws of T. Rex were able to smash and crush the bones of its prey before consuming the flesh.

The bone fragments in the massive chunk of dung were only partially dissolved, Chin said, indicating that the stomach acids in this theropod must have been weak at beset.

In the multitude of bone fragments that Chin and her colleagues found inside the coprolite, they report that they have identified the remains of a juvenile duckbilled beast called edmontosauarus, as well as a juvenile tricerataops, whose ferocious looking horns belied its plant browsing nature.

A dig at the Price River 2 site and the CEM site have been planned for July 9, 10 and 11. (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) Plans are to leave the museum at 9:30 AM to head for the sites which, are near each other. At this time there are no definite plans to stay at the site overnight, but that has not been ruled out, and would certainly be an option for any who would like to do so. The site is only a short distance from the museum, but does require a 4 wheel drive vehicle to get to. It is possible to get within walking distance by regular passenger car, and then one can hike to the site if desired. If you need further information, call John Bird at the bone lab 435. 637. 2120 ext. 5645.

Many of you should have received notice about this dig which will take place during the week of July 20 through 24 (and possibly the 25th). It is a combined effort with the Forest Service, the Utah Archaeological group and our UFOP group. There will be plenty of paleontology and archaeology activities which should interest everyone. A notice is being sent out through the museum which should give all the information you need. If you have not received this information, call the museum for further help. You can also call John Bird, who is the dig foreman for this trip. (By the way, John can tell you what Quitchehpaw means but does not know how to spell it.)

John Bird reports that there will be a lot of digging going on this summer. Twelve dig permits have been issued and there is enough to keep everyone busy all summer. Currently, it is the intent to be out digging Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday of every week in July and into the first three weeks of August.

The locations of the digs will vary depending on weather, scientific value of the site, number of people available, etc. If you want to be involved, contact John and let him know when you are available, or have him give you the details for the dig of the week.

It sounds like everyone should be able to get in plenty of dig time this summer.

NOTE: be sure to keep your log books up to date so the hours you spend in the lab and the field can be entered on the certification chart. If you are interested in certification , it is your responsibility to keep your log and the chart up to date.

Phil Currie, curator of the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology in Canada, said Tuesday that the fossils, found in China, are of dinosaurs capable of running swiftly, flapping feathered wings and fanning out impressive tail feathers. But the animals could not fly.

Currie said the fossils, dated at 120 million to 136 million years old, are absolute proof that birds evolved from dinosaurs, a theory that has been hotly contested for more than 20 years.

"It is a historic moment when a controversy is resolved," Currie said at a news conference. "This shows that dinosaurs are not extinct, but are well-represented by 10,000 species of birds."

Fossils from the earliest known bird, called Archaeopteryx, have been dated at 140 million to 150 million years old.

The new fossils closely resemble Archaeopteryx in some ways, but the new discoveries lack the precise form of true birds, particularly the length of wing and design of individual feathers. For this reason, the researchers believe the fossils represent true dinosaurs that are the immediate ancestors of the first birds .

Currie, Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History and Ji Qiang and Ji Shu-An of the National Geological Museum of China describe the fossils in studies published this week in the journal Nature and in a National Geographic cover story.

Both fossils were removed by Ji Qiang and his Chinese colleagues from rock formations beneath an ancient lake bed in the Liaoning Province in northeast China. The area has gained fame in recent years for containing rich deposits of dinosaur remains.

Alan Feduccia, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the Chinese discoveries "are very interesting," but he said they do not provide immediate and final proof that birds evolved from dinosaurs. He said that the new fossils are dated after those of the first bird. This suggests, he said, that the fossils could be either feathered dinosaurs or primitive birds that just happened to resemble dinosaurs.

"The age dates for these things are still unresolved," said Feduccia. He said if the new fossils represent ancestors of early birds, why are they younger than the early birds?