An action thriller by Jock Miller


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


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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?

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Utah paleontologists probing for signs of dinosaurs’ rise

Chinle Formation proves to be rich in clues about the environment where dinosaurs first evolved. 

A fossil of a fish found by paleontologist Randy Irmis in southeast Utah. Friday, October 4, 2013
For paleontologists Randall Irmis and Andrew Milner, the tiny stuff matters, especially when you’re exploring the dawn of big reptiles. Microscopic fossilized pollen, two-inch fishes, even the color of the rock that bones are embedded in say a lot about the landscapes dinosaurs roamed, the climate, what they ate and what their prey ate. 

And, more important, such details can help explain how they evolved during the late Triassic more than 200 million years ago to dominate the Earth’s land forms for millions of years.

Among the best places to look for clues is Utah’s Chinle Formation, the dark red and orange conglomerates deposited when the Colorado Plateau was a swampy tropical place.

While exploring federal lands in southeast Utah, Irmis and his team of students and volunteers discovered the remains of small fish and a phytosaur. These finds could lead to troves of ancient bones when they return next year with an excavation permit from the Bureau of Land Management. 

"It’s not just a few scales and bones, but the whole skeleton of many different fish," said Irmis, a curator at the Natural History Museum of Utah. He blogs about his excavations in The New York Times. 

The BLM has asked the news media to not disclose the exact location to deter vandalism or theft of the publicly owned resource. 

The phytosaur was a crocodilelike reptile that prowled freshwater environments for prey that included early dinosaurs. The dominant predator, phytosaurs died off like so many other species at the end of the Triassic. 

Phytosaur species have a long snout like modern crocodiles, but the nostrils are close to the eyes rather than protruding from the end of the snout. This is evidence that the crocodile did not descend from the phytosaur and the two creatures developed long snouts independently in a process known as "convergent evolution," according to Milner, a paleontologist with St. George’s Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm. 

He and his colleagues have found numerous phytosaurs, as well as early crocodiles that look nothing like their modern descendants. "When phytosaurs went extinct, it opened up a niche for crocs to evolve," Milner said. The disappearance of the phytosaur also made room for other reptiles.

By Brian Maffly | Reposted from The Salt Lake Tribune
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