The best iPhone app

I just found what must be the most amazingly genious free iPhone app: Taking Pictures With Dinos!!

With it, you can add a dinosaur to pictures you take with your ordinary phone camera (I don't think it works on pictures you already have taken, though)!

Just to try it out, I took a shot at my laptop, which now has a T. rex on top of it :)

 The free version comes with four dinosaurs: Tyrannosaurus, Diceratops, Argentinosaurus and Suchomimus. You can get additional collections of dinosaurs (dromaeosaurids, ceratopsids, sauropods, theropods, and segosaurids) for about $1, I think. Given the infinite possibilites this app gives for any nerd, it shure is worth it!!

Boy, am I going to have fun with this at the airport tomorrow! (I'm leaving for Bristol then!!!!!)

A Mineral Marvel

At last, I have finished my last big project for this year: my rock collection slideshow – A Mineral Marvel. Enjoy!

My plan for the rest of 2012 is to write more about practical and social subjects, now that I am moving to Bristol – a completely different life and with new people to get to know!

The first days before term start, there will be a fun fieldtrip to the Sommerset Coast, and there will probably be more excursions throughout the term, but please understand that I will be much more busy and I expect it to take even longer to get posts finished. Of course, I will try to use as much free time as possible to write all about this exciting transition, which most prospective paleontologists are bound to face.

The fell hiking trip

My most sincere apologies for being so slow with the post about the fell hiking trip we made the first week in August, but I have had plenty of things to do, preparing to move to Bristol (only nine days left! iiiiiiih!!), working on the rock collection slideshow (which kind of was more fun that writing this post, so it got priority during days when I was less motivated), and so on... 

But here it is, finally! I hope you can enjoy it anyway!

 

(But first, a reminder about the slideshow of this trip, to help you get into the mood and all… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxfIBqfIqeA)

We travelled by train (a six-hour journey) from Uppsala to a village (whose name I have forgotten completely) close to Vålådalen, which was our starting point. A taxi minibus brought us the rest of the way there.

We started off from the fell station of Vålådalen, a small community of buildings including hotel rooms, a restaurant, a small grocery store. As I have mentioned earlier, there are different approaches to hiking in the fells. Many hikers spend the nights in such stations across the fell, either wandering from station to station or having one as a base point and make shorter daily trips back and forth. We, however, brought tents to sleep outdoors, and supplies for a week to wander around as we wished, camping where we found suitable – more freedom, but more demands.

Setting out, I was in a mixed state of mind: drowsy after the long journey, but high in spirits from the excitement of what to come. You could already see the snow-covered mountains in the distance.

With my hopelessly bad sense of location, I thought it best if I stay away from the map and out of the discussions of where-are-we-now and where-do-we-go-next.

We were not walking around at will, but stuck to a trail, a pre-set path marked both on the maps and in life. There are two main types: winter trails, marked by tall poles with large red crosses on top (so that you can see them when everything is covered by snow), and summer trails, marked only with occasional flecks of red on a rock, tree or sometimes on a bush. The path to our destination – the resting cottage of Lundörrspasset – involved winter, summer and combined trails (with both types of markings, where you can go both in winter as well as in summer).

A winter trail, clearly marked with large, red crosses on poles.

The summer trail markings were only red dots of paint, more or less conspicuous than this one.

The first ten minutes of walking were through a regular, sandy mud terrain with typical vegetation around. However, soon enough, we reached a large bridge over a broad stream.

The water was crystal clear! Even though it probably was less than waist-deep, in normal Swedish lakes or streams, the water is so full of dust and microbes that you can’t see the bottom at that depth, yet, here, the stony riverbed was perfectly visible.

More fantastic, though, was the view to the sides.

It was a perfect place to stay for a while and just enjoy the natural splendour. But we were soon on the move again.

Favourite dinosaur?

Everyone, shout out which is your favourite dinosaur!

I have been thinking and thinking and thinking about which dinosaur I like the best, but I can never come up with a definite answer. There are so many that are so fascinating in their own ways, that it is impossible to settle for just one.

My favourite dinosaur group is definitely the sauropods – the long-necked, colossal herbivores – for so many reasons I can’t even start to name them. But all sauropods were pretty similar to one another – what distinguishes them are mostly details in small holes or depressions in their skulls and vertebrae – so I would say my fascination belongs more to the group as a whole (the homogeneity being one of the characters that fascinate me), not any individual sauropod.

Previously, for some time, I was all about Iguanodon – the one with the thumb spikes – because it was such an intriguing creature – sort of a transition between ornithopods with primitive dentition (teeth) and the hadrosaurs (the duck-billed dinosaurs; ornithopods with perhaps the most advanced chewing apparatus in the animal kingdom) – and because I misinterpreted what I read in a book about their success: the book said that the igunanodontids (a group containing Iguanodon, its close relatives, hypsilophodontids [a group of really small ornithopods] and hadrosaurs) were spread across the globe, but I read it as if it was Iguanodon itself that had been so successful.

Now, however, I am quite blank. I am pretty into Spinosaurus and Therizinosaurus, because they both are so utterly weird – in a great way! But I cannot decide…

So please help me out : tell me which is your favourite, and why, and that might give us some good ideas!

The Museum of Evolution

I took my uncles on a tour through the paleontology part of the Museum of Evolution in Uppsala. It was quite nice going back there, and, as always, you discover new stuff everywhere!

First, however, we went past Geocentrum, the geological department at Uppsala University – the place where I studied geology – where I heard they had mounted a mosasaur skeleton in the ceiling. This is awesome, since the paleontologists in that department mostly work with invertebrates, so they sure needed some real vertebrate fossil stuff. Sure, trilobites and brachiopods are nice, but they bleach in comparison with a voracious vertebrate predator!

The Museum of Evolution, I have been told, is one of the finest museums of natural history in Europe. It might not be as fancy as the Natural History Museum in London, but the actual fossil specimen are far more spectacular.

But there are not only fossils. They also have a room full of incredible minerals and rocks.

It is crazy how many weird and wonderful rocks there are in this world!

Seeing the skeleton of a familiar animal is usually a strange experience. They can look so different, usually more vicious. Take a hippo for instance.

Snakes are usually dull-looking creatures, but their skeletons are truly amazing.

When I try to read about dinosaur vertebrae, I usually end up on the verge of falling asleep and not understanding anything. They are just so complicated (and I have not yet stumbled upon a text that explains the stuff well)… That is why I prefer the vertebrae of aquatic animals: the water gives a lot of support for their bodies, so they do not need the vertebrae to interlock in complex ways, but can look pretty much like a flat barrel. Take these whale vertebrae for example.

A museum without a Tyrannosaurus rex is kind of futile, because it is such an iconic dinosaur. The Museum of Evolution has an only slightly deformed skull of T. rex.  

And some adorable T. rex toys – not even adult paleontologists can resist these things.

Another skull belongs to Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis, which I think has one among the most awesome-looking heads in the animal kingdom.

There is also a replica of the famous Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx – a significant link between dinosaurs and birds – where you can see both reptilian and avialan features: feathers like a bird; hands, teeth and a bony tail like reptiles. This specimen could be seen as the spark to the realisation that birds were the direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs.

Another world-famous dinosaur – but this time it is the original – is the unique specimen of the sauropod Euhelopus zdanskyi. Being the only specimen of this species in the world, it is quite a prize!

But there are also mesmerizing wax models of live interpretations of dinosaurs, including Deinonychus (picture) and Velociraptor.

There is also a large section of mammal fossils. Among them, the ones I found most curious today were the giraffes, whose horns I noticed were a bony part of the skull, and not fleshy appendages as I had always thought they were – they just look so… I don’t know… cushy.

This was contrasted to rhinoceroses, whose fierce-looking horns are in fact not bone, as you can see on the skeleton, but made of roughly the same substances as our hair and nails (keratin).

Also, rhinoceros teeth are pretty weird. In an interesting way.

Some mammal-like reptiles (or, formally, synapsids) – creatures intermediate between reptiles and mammals – are also rather impressive.

Naturally, the museum has a section of marine vertebrates as well. It includes many spectacular ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs, and even fossil rays. 

On one of the ichthyosaurs – the more fish-like of the marine reptiles – you can even see impressions of the outline of the body in real life. (The ribs seem to stick out through the belly, but that is because the fossil has been flattened out by heavy rock layers.)

The mosasaurs – snake-like marine lizards – don’t need to be described in many words. They are just plain wicked.

And the ray. No words need to be said here either.

These phenomenal fossils, and much, much more, are to be found in the paleontology part of the Museum of Evolution in Uppsala, Sweden. If you want to visit – and I urge you to do so! – their website is http://www.evolutionsmuseet.uu.se/indexeng.html

Amendment

I have recently begun to have serious doubts about whether all those rocks I have been calling pegmatite were not in fact simple granite. The only ones I know for sure are pegmatite are those from the excursion to Väddö, where the teachers explicitly identified them as pegmatite. The rocks I have found in the forest around my home were similar in colour and had pretty large grains – pegmatite is mainly distinguished from granite by its extremely coarse grains – so I called them pegmatite without more thought to it.

But, eventually, I came to wonder whether those grains really were that large. I recall vaguely that a pegmatite has a grain size of about 2 cm or more. I checked with some sample rocks I have collected, and their grains are closer to 2 mm. Moreover, I read now that pegmatite usually appears as an elongated tongue (it is a gångbergart – a Swedish term referring to igneous rocks that readily form in subterranean tunnels), while granite is more common as massive chunks like the ones I have seen in the forests.

Thus, I wish to announce the following amendment: all rocks I have identified as pegmatite since the excursion to Väddö are most probably actually granite. My sincerest apologies for the misconception, and for any troubles it might have caused. Errare humanum est…