Velociraptor: A Feathered Friend?

If you've seen the movie Jurassic Park, then you probably have a pretty clear picture of what Velociraptor looked like: a smoothed-skinned, long-armed, vicious meat-eater. Unfortunately, that image turns out to be another reminder that you shouldn't believe everything you see on screen. According to evidence published in this week's journal "Science", Velociraptor had feathers!

How could they tell? Scientists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in Chicago looked closely at the arm bone of one of the creatures and found a series of bumps where feathers attached, just like we see today in modern birds like the turkey vulture.

"The question is why an animal that's clearly not flying would have this structure," says Lindsay Zanno, a graduate student who studies related dinosaurs here at the Utah Museum of Natural History. One theory is that Velociraptor descended from ancestors that once flew. Other thoughts include that the feathers were used for display like a peacock's tail, to help keep warm-blooded dinosaurs warm, or to control the temperature of nests. Whatever the reason this species had feathers, "It's good to finally have proof" says Zanno.

Could any of Utah's dinosaurs have had feathers too? Possibly, but no one knows for sure. While Utah was home to many cousins of Velociraptor including the world famous dinosaurs Utahraptor, Falcarius, and Hagryphus, the ancient environment at their burial ground wasn't right to preserve feathers.. However, similar marks on a bone could in theory show up. "It makes you want to go back and look closer, to see if you were missing something," says Zanno. "Each step forward makes you look back; there's a constant reevaluation."

Why do you think a creature who couldn't fly might have had feathers? Click "Comments" below and let us know!

Lights Off Utah

If you've been thinking about doing some stargazing, tonight might be your night: between 9 pm and 10 pm, if all goes as planned, Utah will be dark.

The Lights Off Utah campaign is encouraging people, businesses and governments all over the state to go dark for one hour. The idea is to remind people of the importance of energy conservation, and to show that our behavior can have a big impact.

Why bother? Well, there are a lot of reasons to think about saving energy, but one you may not have thought of is to experience night the way Utah's early inhabitants might have. For much of Utah's history, there was little or no artificial light once the sun went down. Native inhabitants and early pioneers saw a very different sky than our cities allow us to witness. Even Utahn's in rural areas aren't immune to the effects of electric lights; in fact, most parts of the globe are in some way affected by lights at night.

It won't exactly be a time machine, but take a moment to turn off some lights and look around tonight. You might be glad you did.

How else might nights have been different before electricity? How might your life change if it were dark at night?

Escaping the heat of a record-hot summer

Feel a little overheated this summer? You're not alone. The National Weather Service announced this week that Summer 2007 was the hottest summer on record in Salt Lake City. The average temperature for June, July, and August was 79.3 degrees, beating the previous record (set in 1994) of 78.6 degrees.

79.3 degrees may not seem that warm, but keep in mind that's the average temperature. Every sweltering day tugged that average temperature up, and every cool evening tugged it back down. This year, the hot days were so hot and the evenings so not-that-cool that the average ended up way above normal (by 5.4 degrees). And it's not just this year that it's been warm: five of the top seven hottest Salt Lake summers have been in the last 13 years.

Sweaty humans, high A/C bills, and melted ice cream cones aren't the only results of high summer temps. Warm weather affects all kinds of things in the natural world, including the life cycles and habitats of plants and animals. In fact, Eric Rickart and Becca Rowe, biologists here at UMNH, are using the Museum's collections to understand how things have changed over the years. They're finding out how animals react to the heat by comparing information about small mammals collected in the 1920s to new data the team is collecting now. The work is still in progress, but so far it seems like the animals are moving up higher into the mountains to escape the increasing heat. While Eric and Becca's research is in Nevada, it provides good clues to what might be happening all over the west.

So next time your thermometer reads 103 degrees, maybe it's time to make like the critters and head for the hills. I recommend making some kind plan, because I bet we're not done with off-the charts heat. Let's just hope we all keep our cool.

Other Summer 2007 records:

• In St. George, July 6th was an all-time record high minimum at 92 degrees (that means it never got cooler than that, even at night!)
  
• July was the hottest month ever recorded in Salt Lake City, with an average monthly temperature of 84 degrees (previous record was July 2003 at 83.4 degrees).
• This August tied with August 2003 for the record high monthly minimum average in Salt Lake City, at 67.8 degrees (that means it stayed really warm, even at night).
  
• The summer included 17 days that were 100 degrees or warmer, the 2nd most all-time in a summer, and 47 days over 95 degrees, which is third most all-time.
• There were 7 record-breaking daily high temperatures in Salt Lake City, on June 16, July 6, July 14, July 15, August 13, August 14, and August 16.

Did you notice any interesting changes due to this summer's warmth? How did the heat affect you?

Bee Mystery: Scientists Get a Clue

Have you heard the buzz about bees? They're disappearing! All over the country, honeybees have been mysteriously vanishing from their hives.

Beekeepers first noticed the problem in 2006: they'd open a hive, and the worker bees would be gone! A hive could go from healthy to empty in just 2 weeks. No one knew what was causing the problem, but experts named it Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

So far, CCD hasn't made it to Utah. But without knowing how it's caused or spread, we can't be sure it won't get here. If it did come to Utah, bee keepers could lose up to 90% of their hives. That's a problem for more than just people who love honey; bees play an important role in producing much of the food we eat.

"People just don't realize how important pollination is," says Debbie Amundsen, a staff member at UMNH and an amateur beekeeper. According to the US Department of Agriculture, "about one mouthful in three in the diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination." That includes almost 100 crops, such as almonds, peaches, and cucumbers. In Utah, bees also pollinate the alfalfa that is used to feed livestock.

The good news is, a team of scientists has just discovered an important clue to what causes CCD. They noticed that a new virus (first seen in Israel in 2004 ) is usually present in hives that suffer CCD. They don't think the virus is causing the collapse by itself, but teams up with other stresses to bring the bees down. "This research gives us a very good lead to follow," said Jeffery S. Pettis, one of the scientists working on the problem. Let's hope they solve this mystery before it's too late!


Talk to us! How might your life be different if there were no more bees? Click "Comment" below and let us know!

Old Flowers: New Evidence

Imagine what the earth was like 80 million years ago: the sights, the smells, the sounds.... I bet your mind didn't leap straight to orchids, did it? But scientists at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology are buzzing about new evidence that the first orchids are old enough to have lived that far in the past, right alongside dinosaurs.

To what do we owe this newfound vision of T-rexes tromping along next to showy flowers? Why, to a bee! Lucky for us (though not for the bee), sometime around 15 or 20 million years ago a bee was covered in tree resin as it went about its daily business. Over millions of years, as the tree was buried, the sap hardened into amber with the bee trapped inside. Eventually, someone found the preserved fossil in the Dominican Republic and brought it to the Harvard Museum to study.

So how did a 15 million year old bee tell us about 80 million year old orchids? As it turns out, the amber preserved not only the ancient bee, but also the pollen grains it was carrying on its back. By carefully studying the pollen grains, the scientists were able to determine not only what kind of plant they were from but also how they relate to modern species.

This find was particularly exciting to scientists, because it's the first window into orchid evolution they've discovered. "It's absolutely fantastic," an orchid specialist told Nature magazine. "It's what the orchid community has been waiting for, for a long time."

Utah Mine Collapses: Caused by a Quake?

This morning, the Deseret Morning News reported that six people may be be trapped in a coal mine near Huntington, UT. Rescuers are searching for the miners, but haven't yet been able to reach them. The miners were trapped when a section of the mine caved in.

As the search continues, scientists are trying to understand what might have caused the incident. Seismograph readings show that close to the mine, there were vibrations in the earth around the time of the cave-in. The jolt measured 3.9 on the Richter Scale.

The hard part is knowing whether there was an earthquake that caused the mine to collapse, or if the collapse itself is what caused the earth to shake.

"Normally, rocks in the Earth's crust are constantly subjected to pressures from all sides. This is called a confining pressure. However, the mining of coal leaves a low pressure zone (empty space). After mining, pressures are still being applied to the rock on all other sides, except at the wall of the tunnel. If the rock is not strong enough to withstand this stress, the wall of the mine tunnel gives way. These "bursts" are well named because there is often no warning and large rocks can be thrown horizontally or vertically, as well as drop from the ceiling during these events. In addition to these relatively small rock bursts, more catastrophic "implosional" failures can also occur on a much larger scale. Sometimes large sections of mines can collapse.

"Mine tremors", rock bursts or mine collapse events, are recorded on seismograph instruments in exactly the same manner that earthquakes are recorded."

-University of Utah Seismograph Stations website

We still don't know what caused today's incident, but the U of U Seismograph Stations say that in the Utah coal belt, about 1/4 of tremors are a result of mining, while 3/4 are natural earthquakes.

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