Dinosaur Week on GPB Radio!
Georgia Public Broadcasting presents Dinosaur Week on TV and radio, coinciding with GPB's launch of a new children's show called Dinosaur Train. The program, produced by Jim Henson Productions, teaches children about the scientific method.
That got us thinking about dinosaurs here in the South. Believe it or not, they roamed our neck of the woods millions and millions of year ago too!
Friday, September 18, 2009
When dinosaurs, crocodiles and other prehistoric critters roamed the earth, they preyed on animals and fought bitterly for survival. They also did one other thing: they pottied. Their deposits, some big and some small, are now being studied by researchers. WACG's Mary Ellen Cheatham takes us to a science lab in Columbus where that research is happening.
Coprolites, otherwise known as fossil poop, are being researched in Columbus, Georgia. (photo by Mary Ellen Cheatham)
To help kick off Dinosaur Week, Georgia Public Broadcasting has launched a new website at http://www.gpbkids.org. Rickey Bevington sits down with GPB's Flash Developer Jeremiah Bratton and gives us a tour of the fun, interactive games.
GPBKids.org launched in conjunction with Dinosaur Week at Georgia Public Broadcasting.
Rickey Bevington spoke with Dr. Anthony Martin of Emory University. He says dinosaurs left clues about what kinds of foods they ate in some interesting places.
Dr. Anthony Martin of Emory University says we know what dinosaurs liked to eat thanks to their fossilized "remains." (photo courtesy Emory University)
Thursday, September 17, 2009
It's a clash of dinosaurs veiled in beauty at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. Melissa Stiers tours the place where art meets science.
A bronze artistic rendering of a Georgia-dwelling Lephorathon family outside Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. (photo courtesy Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta)
Somewhere hidden deep in the woods near Columbus bones have washed ashore — dinosaur bones! From WACG in Augusta, Mary Ellen Cheatham reports.
David Schwimmer, a paleontologist in Columbus, sits on the edge of a creek in west Georgia. Schwimmer says the creek is the only place in Georgia where dinosaur bones have ever been found. (photo by Mary Ellen Cheatham)
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
In Northwest Georgia, a museum has opened up to great fanfare. The Tellus Northwest Georgia Science Museum has already seen 140,000 visitors this year, far outpacing museum projections. Part of the success is a large fossil collection. WGPB's John Sepulvado reports.
Dinosaurs can be scary, but they’re not around anymore. Maybe that’s why children love to watch them on television, read about them in books, and play with toys modeled after the prehistoric creatures. But for one Macon teenager, that interest is a little deeper and much more academic. From member station WMUM in Macon, Josephine Bennett reports.
Harry Groce, 10, posing with fossilized dinosaur tracks on a trip to Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison, Colorado. (photo by Philip Groce)
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Jaws wasn't always the scariest creature in the sea. About 80 million years ago, an eel-like predator called the mosasaur made for some pretty anxious swimming. Orlando Montoya from member station WSVH in Savannah explains what some have called the "T. Rex of the Sea."
The mosasaur was the ocean's top predator millions of years ago, when most of Georgia was a sea floor.
(photo courtesy Georgia Southern Museum in Statesboro)
Fifteen years years ago, geologist Tim Chowns began examining rock samples at the Savannah River Site near Augusta. The nuclear plant was looking into the possibility of storing nuclear waste underground, so they hired Chowns to examine the makeup of the terrain. WACG's Noel Brown spoke with Chowns, who made a shocking discovery amongst the 200-million-year-old rocks.
Dr. Tim Chowns shows off his discovery. Inside the core (right) hid the skull of a cotylosaur
(which was confirmed by the slide, left).
Monday, September 14, 2009
This creature doesn’t actually qualify as a dinosaur, but he lived in Middle Georgia 45 million years ago when it was the site of a giant, prehistoric ocean. Josephine Bennett from member station WMUM takes us to the Museum of Arts and Sciences to meet "Ziggy the Zhygoriza."
Ziggy was found just south of Macon in a Twiggs County. His skeleton is the size of a small car and is suspended prominently from the ceiling of Macon's Museum of Arts and Sciences.
Mary Ellen Cheatham of member station WACG introduces us to a professor, David Schwimmer, who's researched a dinosaur from Appalachia named, fittingly, the Appalachiosaurus. Schwimmer and two colleagues studied and eventually named the tyrannosaur, which is a smaller relative of the giant and ferocious T. rex, after about 40% of the dinosaur's skeleton was recovered in Alabama in the 1980s.
The Appalachiosaurus is a genus of tyrannosauroid theropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Period of eastern North America. (photo courtesy Encyclopedia of Alabama)
