In the world of dinosaur hunters, Barnum
Brown was one of the first stars. He became famous for finding and excavating
the first partial skeleton of a T-rex in 1902. But a few years later, in 1910,
he stumbled on a treasure trove of dinosaur bones along the Red Deer River in
Alberta. Those bones belonged to a close relative of T-rex, now known as
Albertosaurus. And today on the program, we celebrate the 100th anniversary
of that fossil find with one of today's stars of dinosaur hunting, Alberta's
own Phil Currie. He's recreated Brown's journey, and he tells us about it
later in the program ...
Plus - we find out why pigeons are just
as bad at gambling as we are; we learn how whales recycle their poop to
improve the ocean ecosystem; and we hear about a new Canadian project that
will shine light on the dark depths of the seas ...
But first - making a big splash on the Moon
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LCROSS's Smashing Success
Artist's impression of LCROSS, courtesy NASA
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NASA scientists released the results from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission this week, and it seems the Moon is all wet. LCROSS was designed to crash into a shadowed crater near the Moon's south pole, where many scientists suspected frozen water might have accumulated. The impact of LCROSS, it was hoped, would throw up a plume of vaporized material which could then be observed for traces of water. LCROSS, it seems, was a smashing success. According to
Dr. Anthony Colaprete, the Principal Investigator on the LCROSS mission, analysis of the plume from various instruments indicated that there was even more water present than had been expected, along with other volatiles and minerals.
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Whale Poo Feeds the Ocean
Marine Biologist Nick Gales scoops whale poo, photo by Sarah Robinson, copyright Commonwealth of Australia
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The Southern Ocean is not known to be rich in iron because there are not any rivers feeding it, and no iron-rich dust blowing in to it from the ice-covered Antarctica. But
Dr. Stephen Nicol, the Leader of the Southern Ocean Ecosystem Program at the Australian Government's Antarctic Division, began investigating the theory that baleen whale feces was providing the ocean with some of its iron. Research has determined that this is the case because the whale's main source of food, antarctic krill, is rich in iron. The beneficiary of this fertilization process is phytoplankton because it needs iron to grow. Whale 'poo' is distributed in small lumps, and liquid forms near the surface of the water to make it more obtainable for the phytoplankton to absorb. Further research will be done to determine how much C02 the phytoplankton take out of the atmosphere, thus completing this feedback loop.
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Pigeon Gambling
Are you a betting bird?
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From a probability perspective, gambling is dumb. There is no doubt that the odds say that you're much better off keeping your money in your pocket than dropping it into that one-armed-bandit. Yet humans find gambling endlessly appealing, often problematically so. The question psychologists have tried to resolve is why we are compelled to do such a dumb thing. One insight into this comes from experiments that
Dr. Thomas Zentall, a professor of Psychology at the University of Kentucky, has been doing with pigeons. He's found that pigeons prefer the chance at a food jackpot over the guarantee of a regular supply of food, even if, in the long term, the jackpot amount is smaller. What he suspects is that nature doesn't operate like a casino and has conditioned us to assume that one jackpot implies many more to come.
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Neptune Under the Sea
The Neptune Ocean observatory is an 800km-long fibre-optic and power cable loop on the seafloor in the Northeast Pacific, just off the coast of Vancouver Island. It is the largest and most advanced observatory of its kind in the world. Neptune stretches across the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate and is divided by five nodes, or plug-in stations, where a variety of scientific equipment can be installed.
Dr. Mairi Best, the Associate Director of Science at Neptune Canada, says this site was chosen because it is the smallest of the world's 13 tectonic plates. Its size allows for the full range of conditions of a tectonic plate to be observed. The Neptune Ocean observatory will provide live and interactive internet access to information such as seismic activity, currents, temperature, ecosystem analysis, ocean atmosphere interactions, as well as stunning images of marine life. The Neptune Ocean observatory is up and running and is scheduled to provide information for the next 25 years. .
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Albertosaurus Centenary
100 years ago, famous dinosaur hunter Barnum Brown found an amazing fossil site while drifting down the Red Deer River in Alberta. It was a massive bone bed containing the remains of several specimens of Albertosaurus, the huge carnivore closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex. Brown collected as much as he could, and shipped the bones off to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where they were promptly forgotten. In 1996, Canadian paleontologist
Dr. Philip Currie, currently professor and Canada Research Chair in Dinosaur Paleobiology at the University of Alberta, came across Brown's Albertosaurus collection in the museum. With a little detective work, he tracked down Brown's original site in the badlands of Alberta and began a 14-year project excavating it. He and his colleagues eventually found the remains of 26 Albertosaurs, ranging in age from less than two years to mid-twenties, and in size from 2m to 11m long. The animals were all buried at once, suggesting some cataclysm befell them, but also that these giant predators were more social that we'd previously thought. This past summer, Dr. Currie celebrated the 100th anniversary of Brown's voyage by duplicating it, floating down the Red Deer River in a flat-bottomed boat built by colleague Darren Tanke, and by ending his work at the Albertosaurus bone bed.
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein, Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
Saturdays at noon, Mondays at 11:00 p.m., Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. (in some markets only)
Albertosaurus on display at the Royal Tyrell Museum, copyright Sebastian Bergmann, cc-by-sa-2.0
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