Blog Post #3: Favorite Peer Projects

My favorite peer projects were probably the Stone Forest, You are Warned: You Will be Warmed, and the Aurora Borealis projects. The Stone Forest project interested me due to it's sheer beauty, it's a marvelous landscape that is commonly projected in depictions of "old" China. I would love to visit that place and climb the stones and hike through the forests. I also learned a lot from this project, including the myth of the forest and the fact that it's mostly a giant sheet of limestone rock that has been eroded away. I never would've known these things and the project actually taught me something interesting. The project, You are Warned: You Will be Warmed, was another one of my favorites mostly due to the title, very clever. But it also brought to the table the dangers of global warming and greenhouse gases. Global warming is a very real threat to not only us but to other wildlife as well as the planet as a whole. I very much liked that they included animals that are being affected by the issue of global warming; such as polar bears who live off the ice and no longer can do that due to the melting of the polar ice caps. Lastly, I liked the Aurora Borealis project for most of the same reasons i liked the Stone Forest project. The "Northern Lights" are a beauty to behold and I would love to see them in person one day. They are also somewhat of a mystery to me, before their presentation I had a faint idea of what caused them (something to do with temperature or ionization of the air) but their project taught me that and more. Such as, that there is more than one type of this spectacle that happens in the Southern hemisphere (Aurora Austrialis). I also learned that different gases at different temperatures is what actually causes the lights to change color.

Blog Post #2: Canyon Lake Gorge Field Trip

The field trip to Canyon Lake Gorge was a very interesting and exciting, fun field trip. Honestly, I've loved dinosaurs and prehistoric life since I was little (I remember receiving a dinosaur encyclopedia for Christmas and it wasn't one of those basic kid ones either), so the trip was fun. Searching for small prehistoric fossils like the fossilized sea urchins, gastropods, and other shells and ancient sea critters was fun. Some of the stuff, if not most, I had already known- such as the fact that prehistoric sauropods walked like an elephant, leaving figure eight style foot prints due to their round feet. I also knew that carnivores had a 3 toed- very bird like foot print and moved in a weird swaying motion. One thing I found very interesting was the fact that scientists, paleontologists, today have found a way to find patterns in the rock using high powered microscopes and are now able to tell fossilized colors and that they have already figured out that dinosaurs were very colorful. I never knew that was even possible and when I heard it, it just blew my mind. I also thought the landscape was beautiful, I loved the small series of waterfalls where ferns were growing, that was spectacular. I wanted to just climb around and have fun wandering off wherever and exploring the landscape.

Blog Post 1#: Second Quarterly Project, The Effect of Tides on Marine Biology

Our project will explore the effect ocean tides have on the organisms that live in it, the marine environment and it’s occupants. The ocean’s tides, as some of us may know, have an effect on us through our interaction with water. Boating and swimming are some of the most known relationships we have with tides. Have you ever seen a sign on a beach warning of rip tides or something similar? These powerful tides are almost unseen but can rip a person from the beach out into deep, open water. But some of you may ask, what really is a tide? A tide is “the alternate rising and falling of the sea, usually twice in each lunar day at a particular place, due to the attraction of the moon and sun.”- quoted from Google. Due to the gravitational pull on the Earth, the oceans around the world rise and fall as the Earth and Moon perform rotations around one another and the Sun. The rising and falling of these tides has a major effect on marine biology. Many organisms have thus evolved to use the rising and falling of tides to their advantage, to the point that if the tides ceased to exist- so would they. For example, in Mangrove forests a type of fish called the Mud-skipper resides. But it’s no ordinary fish for not only can it live in water- but it can also live on land (for a short period of time though). Most fish in inter-tidal environments survive the retreat of the tide by living in tidal pools or hiding under wet vegetation. But Mud-skippers have adapted to the retreat of the tide by evolving into a completely amphibious fish, feeding and interacting even when out of the water.  
Picture of a Mud-skipper:

Favorite Peer Projects

Titanoboa: The Amazonian Monster, was one of my favorite projects solely based on the fact that it was over a giant snake. Titanoboa was a massive snake that measured at about 50 ft long and weighed over a ton. Related to the modern day Boa Constrictor, it lived in a similar environment- the dense, swampy, humid and hot jungles of the Amazon. It lived during the Paleocene era around 60 million years ago. It would hunt it's prey by ambushing it, then constricting the unfortunate prey to death- be it crocodiles or other ancient Cerrajon animals. It could then go up to a year without eating again. Fossils of the snake were uncovered while workers were mining for coal and uncovering layers of rock in the Cerrajon coal mine.

Marine Fossils was another one of my favorite projects, as I have had a fascination with fossils for awhile, specifically marine fossils. A fossil is any impression or remains of an organism that is preserved in rock or mineral. Fossils are identified by certain qualities- skeletal structure, characteristics, functions, etc. The first person to come up with idea of classification was Aristotle. Two common types of marine fossils were trilobites and sponges. Ichthyosaurus are another type of marine fossil, a lizard-fish like animal that hunted fish and squid during it's reign. It's fossils were found in Torres del Paine in Chile. Two organisms that exist today that are living relatives of marine fossils include salmon and dolphins, they have similar skeletal structures and teeth as their ancestors did.

The Middle Between Birds and Dinosaurs was another one of my favorite projects, most projects that had to do with dinosaurs or prehistoric life held my attention for some portion depending on how well it was done. There were three main similarities between birds and dinosaurs that helped scientists theorize this link between species- they had similar feet, laid eggs, and had hollow bones. In China, a fossil was found by a Belgium scientists that was of a dinosaur, as it had needle sharp teeth, but it had feathers. The dino-bird was named Archeapteryx and sparked a worldwide revolution in paleontology, that maybe dinosaurs and birds were one and the same, just evolved.

Summary of Quarterly Project: Megalodon.

Not only was Megalodon the biggest prehistoric shark that ever lived; it was the largest predatory marine creature in the history of our planet. This shark not only existed, but it hunted and swam throughout the ancient oceans- 1.5 million years ago before going extinct. Carcharodon Megalodon, the king of sharks, was named after it’s teeth. Carcharodon, in ancient greek, translates to “ragged tooth”, due to the serrations the teeth this family of shark equip in their mouths- designed to rip and tear through flesh.  This shark had teeth as big as the palm of your hand, at about 7 inches long. Due to sharks having a cartilage skeletal system instead of a bone one like most vertebrates, fossilized evidence of shark “bones” is very hard to come by. But some vertebrae have been found. Fossils have been excavated from many parts of the world- including Europe, Africa, North and South America, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, The Canary Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Malta, Grenadines, and India. Megalodon teeth have also been found in areas far from continental lands, including the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Due to fossil evidence being found nearly all over the world, we can assume that Megalodon was a cosmopolitan- it’s range encompasses the entire globe.most paleontologists propose that Megalodon, due to its ability to reach high speeds and great size, would prefer to hunt. Fossil evidence has found that Megalodon ate a large variety of fauna, including dolphins, porpoises, small and large whales, and even giant sea turtles that roamed the ancient oceans. During the late and Pliocene and Pleistocene eras, there were ice ages, which cooled the oceans. This is also cooled the Earth’s oceans, this cooling in turn impacted Megalodon, as it preferred warmer, tropical, waters, and as a result it may have declined in population until its ultimate extinction during the Pleistocene era. Competition, climate change, and decline in food supply are three theories to their decline.