Looking For Detachment

I was thinking of cutting my hair, but maybe that wouldn't be a good idea.

Seen first at Dinochick Blogs and Outside the Interzone.

The Accretionary Wedge for January, Pondering the Future of the Earth, is up at Clastic Detritus. Go read it so you know what's in store for the next 1 million plus years!

I'm a little confused about which number this is: either #15 or #16. It looks like it's going down as #15, though I put #16 on my entry, and can't change that now because it's already been linked to. Not a big deal, though - we're talking millions of years; what's a little number like 15 or 16?

The sign in the photo above is at the Rabbit Creek exit, Exit 2, on I-70 in western Colorado, not far from the Colorado-Utah border. The sign points to a 1.5 mile interpretive trail loop, the Trail Through Time, where you can hike to an old dinosaur quarry (that would be a quarry dug for dinos not by dinos!). Stop by when you get a chance! I was in a hurry to get to Fisher Towers, so passed it by this time.

A couple other geobloggers have noted recently that their blogs are on the Regator blog directory. Apparently, my LFD blog has been listed there since March 16th of this year! Like JJ said, the badge shows a Diapsid - a group of particular kinds of reptiles - in this case an alligator:

The Diapsid group includes a lot of famous reptilian types, extant and extinct: including crocodiles, lizards, and snakes; dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and plesiosaurs. (Oh My!)

The Regator list of geoblogs is currently at 20, up from the 18 that Andrew noted a week ago.

It's Friday Fossil Day, and although all my fossils are boxed up or at my other home - I'm here at my little house in the "Nevada outback" - you can see fossils on several other geoblogoshperic sites:

Nova Geoblog has some neat Silurian fossils, including trilobites, my favorite (next to dinosaurs).

Geotripper has a Mesozoic fossil from the Sierra Nevada.

Clastic Detritus has a very nice, and possibly popular (see comments) crinoid fossil from New Mexico. Crinoids are some of my favorite friends. UPDATE: Mel has a photo of the same crinoid at Ripples in Sand.

Geology.com has a link to a new plesiosaur fossil from a mine in Canada.

And Dinochick often has some good dinosaur fossils and other paleontological information, including a recent post about the Gray Fossil Museum. UPDATE: Dinochick has some wonderful stromatolites for Fossil Friday - 1.1 billion years old!

UPDATE: The Lost Geologist has a mysterious fossil for his Weekend Fun series.

Search around, and you will probably find some more good fossil pictures and sites!

The month is just about half over, and it's a little more than a week before I go back to work. MOH is in go mode, back to work after 5 days off.

Although the sun has been out for a few days, and the temperatures have risen daily to freezing or above, it was quite cold today, starting out at 1 degree F at 7:00 am. The sun stayed out all day, the temperature rose to at least 28 F, with the wind chill making it feel more like zero. So much for just wearing a fleece vest while shopping this afternoon.

My little shopping trip was inspired by the breaking of our coffee pot this morning. Smash! I dropped the glass pot on the old wooden floor of our tiny little kitchen. So I braved the cold and drove out to get a new one. After checking out the selection of coffee makers at the hardware store, I decided on a standard 12-cup Mr. Coffee version from the grocery store, a version slightly better than the Proctor-Silex pot I broke. This new pot is our third coffee maker since we moved here in August.

Craig Medred of adn.com wrote an interesting article about the "new" wool v. synthetics. In it, he describes how our synthetic fibers, like polar fleece, come from dinosaurs:

It came from dinosaurs and prehistoric plant life. Their accumulating detritus got buried and, eventually, this organic matter was put under enough pressure that it turned into that black ooze known as crude oil.

Petroleum engineers came along and pumped it out of the ground. Chemical engineers figured out how to break it down into individual hydrocarbon molecules. Eventually, someone figured out how to manipulate those molecules into fabrics.

This is, perhaps, an example of a classic geologic misconception - not that it really bothers me. I grew up a dinosaur buff, perhaps from the first time I saw the dinosaur bones at the Smithsonian Institute when I was five years old. In fact, I may have grown up, at least in my early years, believing the dinosaur-to-petroleum misconception, which was fostered somewhat by the Sinclair Oil gas stations , which had (and have) a dinosaur as a logo. Anyway, I think it's rather romantic to think that dinosaurs died and gave us the energy we use today, even thought it's really the environment that they lived in - marshes and fens and bogs - that turned into the petroleum we pump out of the ground.