Plantas para el otoño...Temporadas de flores!

Desde el 13 de Septiembre en todas los supermercados Lidl:

Temporada de Barbacoa

Ya era la hora de comer fuera con este tiempo soleado esplendido. Y que mejor manera que hacer que una barbacoa?

First Dinosaur Fossil Discoveries

The first 3 dinosaur fossils led to the recognition of a new group of animals, the dinosaurs.
The first nearly-complete dinosaur skeleton in New Jersey spurs modern paleontology.

People have been finding dinosaur fossils for hundreds of years, probably even thousands of years. The Greeks and Romans may have found fossils, giving rise to their many ogre and griffin legends. There are references to "dragon" bones found in Wucheng, Sichuan, China (written by Chang Qu) over 2,000 years ago; these were probably dinosaur fossils.

Much later, in 1676, a huge thigh bone (femur) was found in England by Reverend Plot. It was thought that the bone belonged to a "giant," but was probably from a dinosaur. A report of this find was published by R. Brookes in 1763.

The First Dinosaur Fossil Scientifically Described
The first dinosaur to be described scientifically was Megalosaurus. This genus was named in 1824, by William Buckland; Gideon Mantell (not Ferdinand August von Ritgen) assigned the scientific type species name, Megalosaurus bucklandii. Buckland (1784-1856) was a British fossil hunter and clergyman who discovered collected fossils. (Note: the first dinosaur found was Iguanodon, but it was named and described later than Megalodon.)

It was the first dinosaur ever described scientifically and first theropod dinosaur discovered (this is all in hindsight, because the dinosaurs had not yet been recognized as a separate taxonomic group - the word dinosaur hadn't even been invented yet).

The first dinosaur models (life size and made of concrete) were made by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins of England in 1854. The first dinosaur used for amusement was a life-size model of an Iguanodon (made by Hawkins) that was used to house a dinner party for scientists (including Richard Owen) at a major exhibition. The invitations to the party were sent on fake pterodactyl wings. The party took place in London, England, in 1854

Other Early Dinosaur Finds

IGUANODON

Gideon A. Mantell (1790-1852) was another early British fossil hunter. He described and named Iguanodon, a duck-billed plant-eater (1825); Iguanodon's teeth and a few bones were found in 1822, perhaps by his wife, Mrs. Mary Mantell in Sussex, (southern) England. Gideon Mantell also named Hylaeosaurus, an armored plant-eater (1833) , and others.

HYLAEOSAURUS

The Name "Dinosauria"
Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892) was a pioneering British comparative anatomist who coined the term dinosauria (from the Greek "deinos" meaning fearfully great, and "sauros" meaning lizard), recognizing them as a suborder of large, extinct reptiles in 1841.

He had noticed that a group of fossils (which included remains of Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus) had certain characteristics in common, including:

• Column-like legs (instead of the sprawling legs that other reptiles have)
• Five fused vertebrae fused to the pelvic girdle.

Owen presented dinosaurs as a separate taxonomic group in order to bolster his arguments against the newly proposed theory of evolution (although Darwin's "Origin of the Species" wasn't published until 1859, the basic ideas of evolution were known, but its mechanisms, including natural selection, were not). Ironically, his work actually helped support the evolutionists arguments.

This new taxonomic name, Dinosauria, and new group of reptiles was only the beginning of a great scientific exploration. Since Owen's time, about 330 dinosaur genera have been described. Every few months (sometimes every few weeks), a new species is unearthed (for recent finds, see Dino News). Paleontologists have varying estimates of how many dinosaur genera existed during the Mesozoic Era; estimates range from about 1,000 to over 10,000. Whatever this number really is, there are a lot of new dinosaurs left to discover!

Courtesy: /www.enchantedlearning.com

A Job

Asi que..ya tengo curro! no es algo super guay, como antes, pero es algo muy decente: soy profe de inglés en una escuela publica(catolica...como las mayorias de este país).
Empezé a dar clases sin tener una idea muy buena de como hacer esto..pero parece que me funciona. Claro que al principio estaba asustada y me portaba bién con los niños, sin mucha autoridad.
Por supuesto, que por esto he pagado bastante duro; un niñato ya me insulto, eso era inaguantable, tuvé que hacer algo, y la respuesta era ser más dura, autoritaria y estricta..parece que ahora funciona!
Gracias a Samu por sus ideas magnificas!

:)

Be who you are !

Estoy una más...una persona más sin trabajo! que decepión !
pero tengo esperanza, como cada persona debe tener. No ganas nada si desesperas...hay que tener confianza y todo saldrá bién..

Con lo mucho que me gustaba mirar y analizar las rocas, ahora muy poco puedo hacer, por lo menos no al microscopio...
Y de España no puedo esperar mucho, no creo que podré conseguir algun trabajo decente, por lo menos no en las siguentes semanas...pero, peroooo creo que saldré para adelante...confio en lo que afirmaban los Queen en uno de sus canciones: "Show must go on.."

So let´s get serious and when life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.

Little Liuba

I was reading some time ago a copy of National Geographic where there was an extremly interesting article about the most recent Mamuth discovery, a baby mamuth, called Liuba, who was 4 months old when she died.

Actually it is said that it is the most well preserved piece of a mamuth fossil

A group of shepherds find a baby mammoth frozen in the shore of a river in Siberia.

When one of the shepherd was walking next to the river he saw a strange animal in the shore. The sheperds called the scientists and they took the animal to a museum. In the museum, they analized all the mammoth´s body and then they exhibited it for three days.

The animal is a female. She weighs about 100kg and measures 1 meter. She’s nearly complete, she just misses the fingernails and she has almost her whole hair.

Probably Liuba died drowned in the mud. The scientists have said that she fell into the quiksands, and she couldn’t escape.

En la época de transición entre el Plioceno y el Pleistoceno, los continentes se encontraban prácticamente en la misma posición que en la actualidad. Las placas tectónicas sobre las que reposan probablemente no se han movido mas de 100 Km en relación las unas con las otras desde los principios del pleistoceno.

El clima del pleistoceno se caracterizaba por ciclos glaciales repetidos en el que los glaciares continentales llegaban hasta el paralelo 40 en algunos puntos. Se calcula que durante el máximo glacial, el 30% de la superficie de la Tierra estaba cubierta de hielo. Además, una zona de permafrost se extendía hacía el sur desde el límite de la capa de hielo, unos pocos centenares de km en Norteamérica y mas lejos en Eurasia. La temperatura media anual en los límites del hielo era de -6º C; en el límite del permafrost, de 0º C.