Geologic Column By Frank Bliss Folks are always telling me they have found some really cool "dinosaur eggs". I tell them they are probably not dinosaur eggs. These rounded, spherical or elongated rocks that are often rusty red or yellow in color often fall out of sandstone outcrops. These objects also often take on the persona [...]
A little rock appetizer with that salad? On a "global warming" 60 degree day this January, I was out working on a fence line less that 200 yards from my house. I habitually scan grass less areas of ground looking for indian artifacts or traces of dinosaur fossil material. (Though I need glasses for every other [...]
Petrification as literally translated from the Greek is "to change to stone" In Greek mythology, the serpent haired Medusa was so ugly that one look turned the viewer into stone. The many boulders of petrified wood that occur around the area weren't changed by Medusa's glare. The often beautiful fossil wood often gets more than a [...]
Dinosaurs used to live here but you would be hard pressed to see any evidence of them. As a group, they are mostly romanced by children but some of us never really grow up. I spend a great deal of my spare time "climbing stairs" around the local hills looking for the evidence of their passing [...]
Upper Cretaceous Dinosaurs are actually pretty uncommon in the world. The most common and most well known being the browsing Triceratops. Triceratops was a giant of a fellow. Much like the animal shown in Jurassic Park (the movie). They were the cows of their time being herbivores in contrast to their carnivorous arch enemy Tyrannosaurus rex. [...]
Earth scientists study any aspect that warrants close attention. Young ambitious graduate students will study almost anything. As a grad student, I looked in detail at a two foot thick bed of 400 million year old lagoonaly derived limestone that covered about 100 square miles of south eastern Indiana, others were doing different tasks their professors dutifully assigned them. One of [...]
Article: How to Approach Fossil Collecting and How Not to Get Shot at Doing So. By Franklin E. Bliss Bliss Ranch So you want to collect dinosaur or other fossils and you are visiting an area that might have federal/state/indian lands or even worse, the dreaded private land. The following is a discussion of what it [...]
The other day I went out to a pasture about as far away from my house that I can go on my own property to pick up an ATV left behind for some fencing activity the day before. I hitched a ride to the site with Ray Williams and picked up the ATV around 8AM. I [...]
Geologic Column By Frank Bliss Extinction of the Dinosaurs? I am an active participant of a 600 member strong internet mailing list consisting of experts from many countries in the many fields of Vertebrate Paleontology. The vertebrate part deals primarily only with animals that have backbones and the paleontology part means the study of ancient life. [...]