There is a Legend

Click to Play

I put together this short film to test out my new camera and video editing software. I hope to post more videos in the future.

~Kirk

Guns for Christ

Gentle readers,

For those amongst you who celebrate the christian holiday this season with the exchange of material possessions let me humbly suggest . . . weapons for the whole family. Nothing says, "Christ was born today and died for your sins by being nailed though the wrist and hung until he suffocated under his own weight" like the cool cold feeling of gunmetal! Why even mom can appreciate the good wholesome fun of weapons. Nothing makes her feel safer than knowing there are more guns in her home. Dad keeps one over the fireplace and two in the bedroom, might as well make sure the kids have them too.


The little town on Bethlehem may ring out with the roar of Qassam rockets and the screams of mother's who's children have been killed in the name of religion but your kids will scream with delight as they shoot red white and blue pepsi cans off the white picket fence in the back yard. When they tire of that they can use the new "away in a manger" shooting gallery to test their dead-eye holiday skills. 200 points for knocking the prince of peace right out of the cradle.

If BB guns aren't enough for your little redneck why not consider a .22 like this 5 year old is shooting? Real guns are even more fun and appropriate.

God bless America with a chicken in every pot and a gun in every kids hands.

space station animation

Showing my dorkyness here. This is an animation of the international space station being put together. I think it is pretty impressive. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger . . . when do they add the space hotel module?

Space tourism is becoming real very quickly and all those tourists are eventually going to want someplace to go. It costs so much to get into space (current tickets are about $300,000) and shelling out that kind of money people are going to want to stay up there for a while. Thar's money to be made in a space hotel I tells ya!

~Kirk

Giant Cow Fever

These photos are about a month late in getting posted but they are from a trip I took with my co-workers Paul, Bekah and Julia. We went to Steven's Point Wisconsin for a conference and on the way back we had to stop at this enormous roadside cow, Chatty Belle. How could we not? She certainly isn't as large as Salem Sue that Bekah and I saw on the way to our dinosaur dig last summer but they do claim she is the worlds largest talking cow. We paid our 25 cents but she refused to speak so I'm still skeptical. Odds are she was made by F.A.S.T sign (that's Fiberglass Animals, Shapes & Trademarks Corp) in Sparta Wisconsin.


Not only did she not speak she could not quench our thirst for milk.

~Kirk

Hadrosaur Mummy

This story is finally breaking in the mainstream press. I had the opportunity to visit the site this dinosaur was excavated from when I went on the dino dig this past summer with Marmarth Research Foundation. I'm looking forward to seeing the National Geographic program this week.

This one fossil has the potential to change a lot of what we think we know about dinosaurs.

I guess my toy Hypacrosaurus (a Hadrosaurid dinosaur) pictured above is fairly accurate with those stripes. Of course who knows what color they were. I personally think the teal spots are a bit much.

~Kirk

Camden is born!

My son Camden was born on 11/11/07. Read all about it at Adventures in DNA Mixing.

~Kirk

Republican National Convention Logo

I've been meaning to post this up. Chelsey forwarded this to my attention. This is the logo for the Republican National Convention here in Minnesota. Is it just me or does it look like the elephant is having relations with 2008? At the very least it looks like the republicans are looking forward to crushing 2008 with their out of control elephant just like they have screwed with our civil liberties and crushed our dignity and reputation in the world. I think the logo is perfect except that it lacks a slogan such as "The search for WMD's will continue!" or "Iran 08!"

~Kirk

Freezer of Excellence

I put my frozen lunch into the freezer at work this morning and I just had to take this photo. This is a shining example of how the kitchen freezer at work should always look. Minimum three gallons of Ice Cream and 20 lbs of shade grown fair trade coffee (700 cups worth). The giant puffball mushroom in the orange bag is optional. We're going to freeze dry it for a fungus class next September. The only thing I would improve is that 2 gallons of the ice cream are sub-par-ice-crystals-on-the-top-bucket-style-abominations whereas they should be quality pints like those in the front row.

Fixing annoying "delete to go back" in Firefox

One of the most popular posts here on my blog was where I explained how to get click -hold contextual menus back in Firefox 2.0 Why on earth they thought Mac users would enjoy having to hold the control key whenever they want to see a contextual menu is beyond me.

I love firefox but another hugely annoying feature is that hitting the delete key jumps you backwards though the browser history. Who thought that was a good idea? If you think your cursor is in a text field and it isn't then you're in for a nasty surprise when you hit the delete key to edit your text and you navigate away from your current page. What kind of power user is in such a hurry they can't take the two seconds to hit the back button? Who needs to rapidly speed backwards though their history like that. Even if such users do exist, why the delete key? (that's the Backspace key for you PC users)

There are lots of instructions online about how to disable this feature using the config menu. It is easy and anyone can do it if you can follow directions.

1. Open a new Firefox tab (apple+T) so you can work in one window and read these direction in the original.
   
2. Type "about:config" into the address field of the new window. Hit return and the config page appears.
   
3. Enter "browser.b" into the "filter" field at the top.
   
4. Click-hold the "Browser.backspace_action" Value column, and choose Modify from the pop-up menu. Type 2 for the new value.
5. Click OK.

You're done! Annoying problem solved.

~kirk

135 Birds and Counting!

While on a visit to the St. Croix Watershed Research Station on Sunday, September 23rd I spied three broad winged hawks in the sky circling in a mini kettle. Someone suggested that with only 3 birds it should be called a pot or perhaps a cup instead of a kettle. har har har. Bird humor.

October 4th we had a naturalists' staff meeting at the nature center and while meeting in the lounge, Paul pointed out a blue headed vireo hopping up and down the bark of a large oak out the window. It must have been feasting on insects hiding in the bark. I had no idea they could hold onto the side of a tree like a nuthatch. Very cool to see.

The morning of October 18th I headed out to the George W. Mead Wildlife Area in Wisconsin as part of a conference we were attending. We expected lots of migrating waterfowl but were disappointed. We did find a pond with lots of American Coots (hundreds?) but the only other birds in the pond were five lesser scaups and a couple of pied billed grebes. We kept searching and found some red winged blackbirds, swamp sparrows, field sparrows and juncos. Just outside the wildlife area we stopped at a small pond and spotted a lonely redhead swimming. Hmm, if you don't know that a redhead is a kind of duck is sounds kind of bad that we watched a redhead swim in a pond though our binoculars! Just after we left the wildlife area I spotted a half dozen or so sandhill cranes in a farm field.

October 19th Paul and I woke up extra early to go on an early morning bird hike with other naturalists. I can't believe I got up that early to look at essentially the same birds I see at work everyday.

We left the conference October 20th and we spotted a ruby crowned kinglet though due to a momentary lapse of reason we could not figure out what kind of warbler it was. Duh, it wasn't a warbler. We kept on hearing kinglets so we should have put two and two together sooner than we did. I did spot a brown creeper as well which is always fun.

On the way home to Minnesota, co-worker Bekah spotted a white bird sitting up in a tree on the side of the road. I pulled over turned around ( something that NEVER happens unless I'm driving with other naturalists) and we were super excited to see that the bird was a Krider's Red-tailed hawk. It looks like an albino but it has the red tail. I'd never seen one so that was very cool. It is still a red-tailed hawk so I'm not counting it on my list.

131 Broad-winged hawk
132 Blue headed vireo
133 Swamp Sparrow
134 Redhead
135 Ruby Crowned Kinglet

Cool Dog Window

I think our dog Odin would love one of these. This is a great idea I stumbled upon out there on ye old internete. Now, how to make one? Or, just buy one from pet peek.

~Kirk

Cephelopod Fossil

I joked a few posts ago about bringing home a 10 foot long cephelopod fossil. Well, that has yet to happen. I did find a cephalopod fossil though. About a month ago I took some Girl Scouts to Lilydale Regional Park in St. Paul to look for Ordovician aged fossils. We found the usual suspects in the usual spots and after the group left I ate a quick lunch and headed back into the park to scope out some other sites. I've never had time to fully explore the site so I was looking forward to seeing if there were some other spots I could take groups. I also did a little more exploring in the stream bed and that's where I found this gem.










The kicker is that this is from a much much larger animal and the rest of it was nowhere to be found. It is either still in a hillside or more likely, broken into dozens of pieces and every piece has been found by a different person. Oh well, such is fossil hunting at this site. It is about as picked over as they come. It is still a really cool piece and I'm excited to have it in my collection.

~Kirk

Teach both sides!

Consider this an addendum to my last post.

~Kirk

Where's the Beef?

With all the posts about dinosaurs lately I thought this would be timely.

I recently happened upon one of the major creationist websites and read some of their mind-boggling "science." Creationists rail against evolution and complain that the fossil record is incomplete. They claim there are no transitional forms. They don't claim the transitional forms were not fossilized mind you, they claim they did not exist. The reason they claim they did not exist is that they do not appear in the fossil record and if they had existed they would have appeared.

Real scientists point out that the fossil record is incomplete because the creation of fossils is a sporadic event occurring over a long time period that requires specific conditions. Even given that, there are very few paleontologists and a LOT of ground to cover. Only a tiny fraction of the dinosaurs that are fossilized have been dug up and identified.

Creationists ignore this fact and prefer to believe that the fossil record was created by the great flood. Only animals that existed at the time of the flood could have been killed and buried and fossilized. Since we don't find transitional forms, they didn't exist.

Ahem, herein lies the rub for creationists. There are two huge logical problems with their argument.

First off, if the flood was the singular event that formed fossils and the flood only lasted one year then DUH there aren't any transitional forms because evolution doesn't happen in one year. You can't simultaneously say all the fossils were formed in one year and then claim evolution is false because the "snapshot" of animal life the flood fossilized in one year doesn't' show transitional forms. You can either have fossils being formed over millions of years and then you get to complain about missing transitional forms or you get fossils formed in one year by the great flood but then you can't complain about missing transitional forms. You can't logically have it both ways.

Choose one.

Secondly, Noah took two of each animal onto the ark right? Let's look at a fairly common animal. Deer. If he took two deer onto the ark that leaves, oh, let's say a few billion deer that didn't make it onto the ship. They died in the flood. So did all of the bears, goats, horses, chickens, wolves, kangaroos, squirrels, moose, cows, pigs, etc. that were not the lucky two chosen. The idea creationists but forward is that there are no dinosaurs now because they died in the flood. That is why we find them fossilized.

Hold on here a second.

Dear creationists, if Noah only took two of each animal onto the ark then there were millions of individuals from each species that DID NOT make it onto the ark and would have died in the flood. There are lots of dinosaurs that creationists and young earth believers think died in the flood. Please show me a fossil of a deer, a bear, a goat, a horse, a chicken, a wolf, a kangaroo, a moose, a cow or a pig.

Better yet show me hundreds of millions of them because hundreds of millions would not have made it onto the ark and they would have died right alongside the dinosaurs. They don't show up in the fossil record and you claim that animals that don't show up in the fossil record don't exist. That's weird because I could swear I've seen cows, bears, goats, horses, etc. yet they aren't in the fossil record with the dinosaurs.

You can't have it both ways.

Come to think of it where are the fossils of the millions of people who died in the flood? Why don't we find axes and houses and ox-carts and humans and dogs and sandals and cooking utensils mixed in with dinosaur fossils?

Bah! It isn't worth wasting more time on it. We don't find these things because the world wasn't formed the way some guys with no scientific understanding sitting in a tent thousands of years ago dreamed it was created. If you are a creationist and you read this please explain why when a transitional form can't be found it means the scientists are wrong but it is all hunky dory when creationists can't find a single fossil cow, pig, etc. when there should be millions.

~Kirk

Saprophyte No More . . .

My knowledge is obsolete

The last week of summer camp I discovered some unusual plants in the forest with my campers. I immediately recognized them as saprophites.

Sapro: meaning obtaining nutrients from non-living matter and phyte: meaning plant.

Here's the problem. My knowledge is obsolete. I wanted to identify the exact species and apparently saprophyte is a term no longer used. It was explained to me years ago that a saprophyte is a plant that lacks chlorophyll and thus obtains nutrients from decomposing organic matter. The problem is that now scientists say no plant can do that. What is actually happening is that the plant is engaging in parasitic behavior. It parasitizes a fungi to steal nutrients and it is the fungi that are taking the nutrients from the decaying matter. You may think it is a technicality, the plant is stealing nutrients from fungi rather than taking them from decaying matter, however now scientists say the term saprophyte is technically incorrect and misleading.

They now refer to a plant such as this as a Myco-heterotroph. Great, the kids will really remember that. It isn't a saprophyte kids, it is a myco-heterotroph. I had a hard enough time teaching the word saprophyte to third graders. In reality, they will probably remember the name Ghost Plant, Corpse Plant or Indian Pipe better. I think that's what this is. I've seen it here before but this clump looks different. I think what you see in the photo is an already pollinated flower. The petals have fallen off and it is now standing up straight as opposed to nodding.

Either way, fairly elusive and very cool.

~Kirk

Dinosaur Dig (part 4)

Ah, Thursday and Friday. We're almost at the end of our journey. I'm not posting anything about Friday as it was just our drive home.

After our rain day Wednesday we were itching to get back out in the field on Thursday.

We had a fantastic day. I drank over four liters of water in the field and I was still thirsty. I can see how if you were to run out of water out there it could be bad very quickly. It wasn't even that hot. The week before we arrived they were having temperatures in the 100s.

The arrow on the left shows the view of our van from where we ate lunch Thursday. That white splotch is an 18 foot long 15 passenger van.

Here's the same photo uncropped for comparison. We hiked though this basin and stopped atop this butte for lunch. The spot we're sitting in is relatively flat as they removed a triceratops from this site a few years ago. There were some bone scraps left behind and little pieces of plaster from making a field jacket for the beast. Can you imagine carrying the dinosaur back to where the van is in this photo?

I sometimes read complaints that the fossil record in incomplete. This sometimes comes from those who oppose the theory of evolution. They argue that there has been plenty of time for scientists to find all the fossils they need and transitional forms have not been found.

Have these people ever gone on a dig? The dinosaurs are embedded in hard rock. First you have to find one, then you have to have the time and resources to spend a year or more getting it out of the ground. This often involves taking off layers of stone many feet thick, one exacto blade scrape at a time. Imagine scraping away a whole hillside of hard rock with a dull exacto blade in blazing heat and humidity. Once you finally uncover the dinosaur you have to make a plaster field jacket and then transport it back to a lab (which in some cases means building new roads just to reach the site) It doesn't end there, you have to spend possibly years cleaning and assembling it. Once you see the vastness on an area like this and then realize there are essentially two or three people with a shoestring budget trying to find the treasures that have been battered by erosion and covered over for 65 million years and you begin to see how it may take some time to fill in our gaps in understanding. This is still a very young science and there are many millions of critters still waiting to be dug up.

Thursday was all about microsites. That means we spent a good part of the day sitting on the ground moving painstakingly forward looking for teeth and small limb bones. At the third site of the day I found two dromeosaur teeth but stupidly didn't take a picture. This particular site was still of scientific interest so we couldn't keep anything. It was similar to the teeth pictured here.

In the photo to the left we're heading home for dinner on Thursday. You can click on it (or any photo on the blog) to view a bigger image. The barbed wire fence on the left hand side of the picture marks the border with Montana. I could have spent many more hours in the field I was having so much fun. I inhaled a huge dinner of nachos and encheladas after the hour and thirty minute van trip back to Marmarth. I was very excited to not have hot dish.

I had a great time on the trip and I can't wait to return. I'll have to though. With a baby due soon I won't be able to sneak away for a week to look for dinosaurs next summer. We need to line up some funding as well. In the mean time I'll have to content myself hunting down an relatively complete ordavercian period cephalopod along the banks of the Mississippi or perhaps a complete crinoid. That should keep me busy. Chelsey will be less than thrilled if I do manage to find and bring home a six foot long cephalopod fossil. "Where do you intend to keep that?!"

Well, that's all for now. I'm sure the trip will generate a few more posts.

~Kirk

130 Birdies!

I finally made it to 130 birds. What a milestone. While visiting Chelsey's parents in La Crosse I spotted several tufted titmice (bird 128) in the trees by their home. I figured I would see some there at some point. Every time she calls them in the summer I can hear PETER! PETER! in the background. It was inevitable I would spot one there. There were also female ruby throated hummingbirds kicking through.

On September 10th I attended the Metro Naturalist Training at the Coon Rapids Dam. There were lots of great blue herons and a couple of great egrets. For the record, there were also Canada geese, mallards and a cardinal. The new bird for the list there was a ring billed gull (bird 129). This is sort of a gimme I save for this time of year when the pickins are lean. I probably saw one earlier but I purposefully willed myself not to id birds in the cub foods parking lot.

At Warner Nature Center, where I work, we have weekly trail assignments to force us naturalists to get outside. It seems silly to have to force naturalists outside but you get busy and then feel guilty about going on a hike (which is just as important to our training as anything else.) We need to know what goes on out there if we're going to teach about it.

On my hike today I hiked the new Esker Trail. I spotted bluebirds and goldfinches in the prairie. Once I veered into the woods and hiked along the lake I spotted wood ducks and a flock of white throated sparrows. All in all by the end of my hike I counted over 50 wood ducks. I also saw a green heron and a small group of Myrtle (yellow rumped) warblers. Bird 130 came as a real surprise. A bird landed on a branch right in front of me and I peered through my binoculars. I instantly recognized it. It was an ovenbird. That's bird species 130 for the year. I heard overbirds all summer but was never able to see one. Now that they have stopped calling here one plops down in front of me. Figures. What will be next? I see shorebirds and water fowl in my future as I head to a conference in Wisconsin next month.

128 Tufted Titmouse in La Crosse (Holmen)
129 Ring-billed gull-at metro training
130 Ovenbird

Flying Sharks and Ray Surfing

So my friend Andrea just got back from Japan and while she was there she took a photo of a completely bizarre sign. I cleaned up the image a bit to what you see above. Whatever it means it would make a great T-Shirt. Can anyone read Japanese?

~Kirk

DInosaur Dig (part 3)

Tuesday night we heard a rumble in the air. No, it wasn't one of the two nightly coal trains that sped through town about 50 feet from my window, it was a storm. This is perhaps a good point to put in a picture of the "roads" we traveled on to get to the sites. These are not roads, they are two-track ranch trails through the Little Missouri National Grasslands. Rain is not a good thing for two tracks as it makes them impassable mud pits.

Even at their best, these two tracks are a crazy ride. The kids said it was more fun than Valleyfair. It was a lot of fun to drive and it felt a lot wilder than it really was. We paused to take this photo on what was a pretty typical slope. From inside the van it felt like this was an extreme 45 degree angle when in reality it was only about 18 degrees. Still, that's not normal.

It doesn't look that bad you say? Okay, okay, you'll have to check out the video. The first rule of two tracks is that each track does not need to be at the same height. This was not for people who get carsick!

Click To Play

Wednesday morning we headed into Montana to the little town of Ekalaka where locals drove by again and again to look at the strangers. I'm glad we could entertain them. Ekalaka is home to the Carter County Museum which has a nice small fossil collection including a large hadrosaur, a copy of the skull of Peck's Rex, and a triceratops skull. There were other nice small paleo items as well.

Being the county museum it also featured historical items. My brother would have appreciated the two headed calf. Now that's history we can all ogle at and appreciate. Here's a picture for you Erik.


We ate lunch at the historic and sacred native site the Medicine Rocks which locals have taken care of for the tribes by carving their names, two feet high, into the soft sacred stone. Way to go Montana. It was pretty disgusting not to mention horribly insulting. It would be a little like carving "Class of 95 RULZ!!!" into the crucified Jesus's chest over the altar in a catholic church. God bless America!

We finished up Wednesday by making some plastic replicas of dinosaur teeth and claws. We were supposed to get in some time in the lab but someone (who will remain nameless) decided even though we paid for the experience they should close up the lab early for the season. In the photo, I am showing kids how to add a little natural grit to their replica t-rex tooth to give it that fresh-out-of-the-ground look. Hopefully they aren't selling theirs on ebay as the real deal. Thanks to Doug for letting us work out of his garage as a temporary lab!





That's all for Wednesday!

~Kirk

What's Erik Mona doin?

Friends sometimes ask, "What's your brother up to?"

Wonder no more.

~Kirk