An action thriller by Jock Miller


Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.


purchase on Amazon.com


The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.

The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.

Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


Dinosaurs In Space!




Baby Maiasaura and a parent at a mount in the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Baby Maiasaura bones and egg fragments were the first dinosaur fossils in space. Photo by the author.


Last year, David Willetts hit a sour note when he unveiled his vision of improving science education in Great Britain. “The two best ways of getting young people into science” the Minister of State for Universities and Science said, “are space and dinosaurs. So that’s what I intend to focus on.”


Researchers, writers and science fans quickly jumped on the comment. And rightly so. Space and dinosaurs are popular, but they don’t appeal to everyone. Not every child dreams of becoming an astronomer or paleontologist. But my favorite response to the British official’s comments was the genesis of #spacedino on Twitter. If only spacedino were real, critics joked, we would have a perfect outreach tool. Who wouldn’t love dinosaurs in space? What I didn’t know at the time was that dinosaurs had already been beyond our planet.


The first dinosaur to venture into space was a species that greatly influenced our understanding of dinosaur lives, the hadrosaur Maiasaura peeblesorum. This 76-million-year-old “good mother lizard” cared for its young in large nesting colonies, and small bits of bone and eggshell found at a nesting site were carried by astronaut Loren Acton during his brief mission to SpaceLab 2 in 1985. This was a glamorous time for the dinosaur; Maiasaura was made Montana’s state dinosaur the same year.


Dinosaurs didn’t return to space until 1998. In January of that year, the shuttle Endeavor borrowed the skull of the small Triassic theropod Coelophysis from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for its mission to the Mir space station. Like the remains of Maiasaura before it, the fossil skull was returned to earth after the mission was over.


I guess I was wrong about spacedino. The simple combination of space and dinosaurs isn’t very exciting at all. Dinosaurs on spacecraft amounts to nothing more than trivia. It was not as if the dinosaurs were going to be included in some kind of time capsule—like the Golden Record on the Voyager spacecraft—to teach whoever might eventually discover it about past life on our planet. Real space dinosaurs just can’t compete with their science fiction counterparts.


  By: Brian Switek — Paleontology History

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com 
at
Labels: ,