Friday, October 29, 2010

GeoJeopardy! Fridays

Time for GeoJeopardy! Fridays, because who is really doing anything today.
- Dinosaurs -

Anatosaurus was this type of dinosaur named for a feature it shared with the platypus

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Guinness says the smallest one of these among the dinos was the walnut-sized one of the 30-foot stegosaurus

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The BBC's "Truth About Killer Dinosaurs" staged a fight between T. rex & this 3-horned beast
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Patagosaurus thrived on this continent 160 to 170 million years ago

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Also a type of modern bird, this word follows "ovi" & "Utah" in dinosaur names

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Friday, October 22, 2010

GeoJeopardy! Friday

Time for GeoJeopardy! Fridays, because who can't use a little trivia while you're not doing work. I didn't know one again this week, so how you compare.

- Geology -

This rock from Georgia was used to sculpt the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial
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Crude oil can be extracted from this rock, the most abundant sedimentary rock in the Earth's crust

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The Hawaiian islands consist mostly of this hard, dark volcanic rock

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Due to its luster, German miners gave this "pleasant" rock its name, which means "spark"

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The Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown is the tallest structure in the U.S. made entirely of this
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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Star Wars meets Paleontology - Halloween edition

So coming across this the other day I felt I needed to repost this here. It is for the ILM Halloween party where they turned familiar Star Wars characters into skeletons. The point that I am making as a paleo post is if you look at a few of them, they look a lot like something out of our paleontology text books.



The two in particular that I feel I should point out are the AT-AT-Mammoth mix and the X-Wing-Pterodactyl mix (enlarged below).



Friday, October 15, 2010

GeoJeopardy! Fridays

Time for GeoJeopardy! Fridays, because who can't use a little trivia while you're not doing work. I didn't know one, see how you do.

- Dinosaurs -

Although its name suggests that it had 5 of these, the Pentaceratops had just 3; 2 were merely enlarged cheekbones

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Scientists believe that dinosaurs lived through 3 geologic periods: Triassic, Jurassic, then this next one
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The name Psittacosaurus means this type of lizard; it had a strong beak like that on this present-day bird
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High levels of this metal, at. #77, in rocks near dinosaur fossils led to the asteroid theory of their demise
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Similar to an Apatosaurus, this 52'-tall herbivore whose name means "arm lizard" had longer forelegs than hindlegs

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Friday, October 08, 2010

GeoJeopardy! Fridays

Time for GeoJeopardy! Fridays, because who can't use a little trivia while you're not doing work.

- Geology -

The mineral Andalusite was discovered in & named for a region in this country

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Fluvial is a term that refers to these geographic features

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Granite is composed mainly of feldspar & this transparent crystalline material

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A 79 A.D. letter about the death of this "Elder" scientist had the first accurate description of a volcanic eruption

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In 1812 this German scientist devised a scale to measure the hardness of minerals

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Tuesday, October 05, 2010

GeoJeopardy! Friday (Kinda)

Well since my website was down for a week and a half things got kind of spastic and I wasn't able to do GeoJeopardy until now. So here is your GeoJeopardy! Fridays entry for last week. Also since the website is now fix you can check your answers for this weeks and last weeks questions.

- Sham Rocks -

Some colorless forms of this element with the chemical symbol Zr are known as matura diamonds

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Gary Dahl used 3 tons of stone from Rosarito Beach to create these 1970s fads that couldn't even fetch

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Many experts have doubted the authenticity of a kouros statue at this oilman's L.A. museum
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In 2000 NASA helped bust a man who pled guilty to trying to sell these fake items from Apollo 11
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To stop graffiti on the real thing, visitors can now sign a fake replica of this in the Juyongguan section

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