Latest news with #Cretaceous
National Geographic
3 days ago
- National Geographic
Photo story: A photographer's guide to Texas
Explore Texas through the lens of National Geographic photographer Tara Kerzhner and discover the state's captivating beauty and unforgettable adventures found in every frame. National Geographic photographer Tara Kerzhner set out on a journey through the Lone Star State, documenting the people, places, and stories that define the true spirit and soul of Texas. Photographs by Tara Kerzhner From the geological wonders of Big Bend National Park to the scenic coastlines of Corpus Christi, Texas is a land of infinite variety—and endless photographic inspiration. On assignment, National Geographic photographer Tara Kerzhner set out to capture the spirit and soul of the Lone Star State through its dramatic landscapes, local characters, and hidden corners. What she found was a place full of adventures and breathtaking beauty at every turn. Here, she shares some of her favorite images and the moments behind them. The last light outside Terlingua, Texas, signals the edge of Big Bend country—an endless stretch of desert, ridgelines, and open sky. I loved watching the shadows stretch across a landscape that feels both timeless and ancient. It was the kind of sunset you never forget. The Summit at Big Bend near Terlingua, Texas, offers some of the darkest skies in the country—no light pollution, no noise, just a breathtaking view of the stars. And no special equipment needed either; simply step outside your tent and look up. If you love stargazing, this incredible spot should be at the top of your list. Honestly, it's one of the coolest places I've ever slept! There's nothing like waking up early to catch the sunrise. The Lost Mine Trail—a 4.8-mile round-trip hike winding through the Chisos Mountains in Texas' Big Bend National Park—offers stunning, sweeping views from the top. It's the ideal way to begin your day and makes the early alarm completely worth it. From towering canyons to the tiniest textures along the riverbank, the Rio Grande in West Texas completely blew me away. Its beauty and scale are something you just have to experience to believe. Tim Gibbs, an archaeologist at Big Bend Ranch State Park, walked me through the ancient history of Texas' Big Bend region and showed me the skull of a mosasaur. I was fascinated to learn it was the apex predator of the Cretaceous inland sea—and a distant relative of today's Komodo dragons! A stay at the Gage Hotel in Marathon, Texas, feels like stepping into a living piece of West Texas history. From the architecture to the curated art and thoughtful regional details, every corner tells a story. It's more than just a hotel—it's a window into the heritage, spirit, and culture of the region. My first night in Corpus Christi, I watched as boats rested perfectly still on the calm water. In that quiet moment, the coastal charm of the Texas Gulf wrapped around me like a soft breeze—pure peace, bathed in pastel light. The next morning at Mustang Island State Park began with a quiet walk along the shore, just as the first light broke over the Gulf. The sky shifted from deep blue to gold, and the only sounds were waves and seabirds. It was one of those moments that makes you pause, breathe, and just feel grateful to be there. I had one of those true 'pinch me' moments during a horseback ride at dawn with my guide January Goette on Mustang Island State Park. Riding along the Texas Gulf Coast—on an island named for the wild mustangs that once roamed its shores—felt like stepping into a quiet, timeless piece of history. In Corpus Christi, the gulf-to-table seafood is unbelievably fresh—every bite tastes like the ocean itself. At The Mariner, I had the chance to meet Chef Eric Morin, who served me a delicious red snapper dip, gigantic Gulf shrimp, and the freshest oysters I've ever tasted. They also craft fantastic specialty cocktails that perfectly complemented my meal. It was an experience to remember in a setting that truly captures the spirit of the Texas Gulf. After my meal, Chef Morin took me out on a sunset sail across the Gulf to show me where his seafood comes from. As we glided over the water, migratory birds swept across the sky in every direction, and we even spotted dolphins swimming alongside the boat. It was an unbelievable experience that brought the whole meal—and the Gulf—to life. Getting to experience a place by water is truly unforgettable. On our sunset sail in Corpus Christi Bay, I soaked in Texas' coastal views, pastel skies, and endless horizons. It was a moment of pure magic and a beautiful close to my day.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Drilled for Geothermal Energy. They Hit a 67-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Instead.
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: The Denver Museum of Nature & Science discovered a dinosaur fossil buried in its own parking lot. The partial bone of a plant-eating dinosaur is the oldest and deepest dinosaur fossil ever found in Denver. The museum is a well-known dinosaur buff destination, and has multiple full-size dinosaur skeletons on display. When a museum popular with dinosaur enthusiasts went digging in its own parking lot, the dinosaur fossil their team found didn't have far to travel to make it into an exhibit. The Denver Museum of Nature & Science located a roughly 67.5-million-year-old partial dinosaur bone 763 feet below its own parking lot—the oldest and deepest ever found in Denver. 'This partial vertebra from a plant-eating dinosaur offers an extraordinary glimpse into prehistoric Denver and the animals that inhabited this area,' the museum wrote in a statement. Museum staff weren't looking for dinosaur bones to add to an exhibit when they started digging. Instead, crews were conducting geothermal test drilling to assess the viability of switching from natural gas to geothermal energy. While the equipment was out, they added some scientific coring to their process in the hopes of 'better understand[ing] the geology of the Denver Basin.' That led to the unexpected fossil. The coring hole, just two inches wide, was only supposed to help experts study the soil. There was no expectation of locating something as wild as a dinosaur fossil. 'Finding a dinosaur bone in a core is like hitting a hole in one from the Moon,' James Hagadorn, the museum's curator of geology, told the Associated Press. 'It's like winning the Willy Wonka factory. It's incredible, it's super rare.' The museum said that only two other similar coring samples in the entire world have produced fossils. Neither of those, however, were at the site of a dinosaur museum. The discovery has been dated to the late Cretaceous period, roughly 1.5 million years before the extinction of dinosaurs, and the bone was found alongside fossilized vegetation. 'This animal was living in what was probably a swampy environment that would have been heavily vegetated at the time,' Patrick O'Connor, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum, told the AP. The dinosaur experts believe—as Erin LaCount, director of education programs at the Dinosaur Ridge track site near Denver, told the AP—that the fossil was from a small dinosaur, possibly a duck-billed dinosaur, a thescelosaurus, or another similar-sized dinosaur. Still, there's not enough evidence to distinguish with certainty what type of dinosaur was located. Not everyone was as excited about the find as the folks in Denver. When the AP contacted Thomas Williamson, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science in Albuquerque, he agreed it was an unexpected discovery, but said it was one without much value because there's no real way to determine what species of dinosaur was found. 'It's a surprise, I guess,' he said. 'Scientifically, it's not that exciting.' Folks in Denver, though, may oppose that view. With the fossil now on display in the museum's Discovering Teen Rex exhibit, Hagadorn said he'd love to excavate the entire parking lot to find the rest of the dinosaur. 'But I don't think that's going to fly,' he said, 'because we really need parking.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life? Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Large dinosaur mating 'dance arena' discovered in Colorado
Researchers have discovered evidence of one of the largest dinosaur mating "dance arenas" in present-day Colorado. Previous studies have identified a couple of "dinosaur lek" areas -- where male dinosaurs likely congregated to perform courtship displays for females, primarily for the purpose of finding a mate -- at Dinosaur Ridge, 20 miles west of Denver. However, using high-resolution drone photography and photogrammetry to make 3D models of the sandstone at Dinosaur Ridge, a team reexamined the area to see if there were more markings on the surface. MORE: Jurassic Park-ing lot: Dino fossil turns Denver museum into dig site What they found were dozens of lek traces tightly clustered together, suggesting the area was once a site to perform mating rituals, similar to some modern-day birds. "So, these trace fossils, we interpret them to be evidence of dinosaur courtship activities, just from kind of process of elimination," Caldwell Buntin, co-author of the study and a lecturer at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, told ABC News. Buntin said the team ruled out that these "scrapes" were caused by dinosaurs digging for food and water, from marking their territories or from colonial nesting, which is when animals build their nests close together in groups. "Basically, these were a lot of organisms that were coming together, performing some kind of activity that would include building some kind of nest to display to a female, and then maybe doing some kind of a dance or scraping activity, which generates a lot of the scrapes around the nest display structure," Buntin said. The scrapes belong to theropod dinosaurs, characterized by hollow bones and three toes and claws on each limb, which were alive during the Cretaceous period, between 145 million and 66 million years ago. It's not clear which species made the scrapes, but they were likely three to four feet high at the hip and were between 2.5 and 5 meters (8 to 16 feet) long, from the size of an emu to the size of an ostrich, according to Buntin. MORE: New horned dinosaur species discovered 'largest and most ornate' of its kind ever found There's a "spectrum of different scrapes," according to Buntin. Some are simple, shallow toe claw marks, indicating one or two scrapes from the left and right legs. There are also longer scrapes overprinting one another, resembling a wagon rut. Additionally, there are semicircular bowl-shaped marks "associated with a step backward" with a second set of scrapes "indicating a counterclockwise or a clockwise turn." Lastly, there are deep bowl-shaped marks with some shallow toe claw marks, Buntin said. In terms of behavior, Buntin said these dinosaurs most resemble that of banded plovers, which are small shorebirds. "Basically, they will dig out a nest display, basically a fake nest, to be able to show a female that, 'Hey, I'm a strong male. I can dig this. I can make a good, strong place for you to lay your eggs,'" Buntin said. "And then when a female comes to visit, they'll perform a dance which consists of kind of bowing, bobbing, raising their wings out, creating some scratches around the sides of that display nest." The authors emphasized that the site is public, meaning anybody can visit and see the scrapes for themselves compared to other scrap sites, which are on federally protected land. "It does really make it a very, very unique site, because not only does it have this amazing like type behavior displayed, but it also is so accessible for lots of people to be able to see it and understand better about the behavior of these wonderful animals that we can see now," Neffra Matthews, study co-author and former employee of the Bureau of Land Management, told ABC News. Solve the daily Crossword
4 days ago
- Science
Large dinosaur mating 'dance arena' discovered in Colorado
Researchers have discovered evidence of one of the largest dinosaur mating "dance arenas" in present-day Colorado. Previous studies have identified a couple of "dinosaur lek" areas -- where male dinosaurs likely congregated to perform courtship displays for females, primarily for the purpose of finding a mate -- at Dinosaur Ridge, 20 miles west of Denver. However, using high-resolution drone photography and photogrammetry to make 3D models of the sandstone at Dinosaur Ridge, a team reexamined the area to see if there were more markings on the surface. What they found were dozens of lek traces tightly clustered together, suggesting the area was once a site to perform mating rituals, similar to some modern-day birds. "So, these trace fossils, we interpret them to be evidence of dinosaur courtship activities, just from kind of process of elimination," Caldwell Buntin, co-author of the study and a lecturer at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, told ABC News. Buntin said the team ruled out that these "scrapes" were caused by dinosaurs digging for food and water, from marking their territories or from colonial nesting, which is when animals build their nests close together in groups. "Basically, these were a lot of organisms that were coming together, performing some kind of activity that would include building some kind of nest to display to a female, and then maybe doing some kind of a dance or scraping activity, which generates a lot of the scrapes around the nest display structure," Buntin said. The scrapes belong to theropod dinosaurs, characterized by hollow bones and three toes and claws on each limb, which were alive during the Cretaceous period, between 145 million and 66 million years ago. It's not clear which species made the scrapes, but they were likely three to four feet high at the hip and were between 2.5 and 5 meters (8 to 16 feet) long, from the size of an emu to the size of an ostrich, according to Buntin. There's a "spectrum of different scrapes," according to Buntin. Some are simple, shallow toe claw marks, indicating one or two scrapes from the left and right legs. There are also longer scrapes overprinting one another, resembling a wagon rut. Additionally, there are semicircular bowl-shaped marks "associated with a step backward" with a second set of scrapes "indicating a counterclockwise or a clockwise turn." Lastly, there are deep bowl-shaped marks with some shallow toe claw marks, Buntin said. In terms of behavior, Buntin said these dinosaurs most resemble that of banded plovers, which are small shorebirds. "Basically, they will dig out a nest display, basically a fake nest, to be able to show a female that, 'Hey, I'm a strong male. I can dig this. I can make a good, strong place for you to lay your eggs,'" Buntin said. "And then when a female comes to visit, they'll perform a dance which consists of kind of bowing, bobbing, raising their wings out, creating some scratches around the sides of that display nest." The authors emphasized that the site is public, meaning anybody can visit and see the scrapes for themselves compared to other scrap sites, which are on federally protected land. "It does really make it a very, very unique site, because not only does it have this amazing like type behavior displayed, but it also is so accessible for lots of people to be able to see it and understand better about the behavior of these wonderful animals that we can see now," Neffra Matthews, study co-author and former employee of the Bureau of Land Management, told ABC News.
Observer
5 days ago
- Science
- Observer
Fiona the Pregnant Sea Reptile's Fossil Hints at the Birth of a New Ocean
About 131 million years ago, a pregnant ichthyosaur — a dolphin-like reptile of the dinosaur era — swam in seas that are now part of southern Chile. And then she died. An accomplice in the killing: the breakup of the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland. South America, once unified with Africa and Antarctica, pulled away, and a new ocean basin called the Roca Verdes opened up. 'One of the hypotheses is that this is actually the opening of the early South Atlantic Ocean,' said Matthew Malkowski, a professor of geological sciences in Texas. The geological forces that pulled apart the continents also ruptured the Earth's crust, causing volcanoes and earthquakes, and those earthquakes sometimes set off massive underwater landslides. One day in the early Cretaceous period, one of those landslides collapsed down a submarine canyon in Roca Verdes, generating turbulent flows of sediment. 'Probably these landslides might have trapped the ichthyosaurs and threw them to the bottom of the canyon and covered them with sediment,' said Judith Pardo-Pérez, an associate professor in Chile. — KENNETH CHANG / NYT
