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Pittsburgh (UPI) Sep 6, 2010 A Pennsylvania man kayaking on a local river found a tree fossil embedded in a rock at the river's side that experts say is almost 300 million years old. Shaun Blackham of Demont, Pa., was paddling his kayak on the Kiskiminetas River in Armstrong County in July when he spotted the fossil imprinted on the surface of a rock, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported. "There it was, staring me right in the face," said Blackham, 45. The plant fossil was 3 to 4 feet long and 10 to 14 inches wide. Blackham kayaked back to the site later and photographed the fossil. He e-mailed the photos to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Museum geologist Albert Kollar recognized the fossil as bark from a now-extinct lepidodendron tree, a large, palm-like tree that grew in coal swamps during the Carboniferous period of the Paleozoic Era. "It was a pretty interesting find," Kollar said. Blackham has enjoyed history and the outdoors since childhood, he said, and has found other, smaller fossils in the area. "This kind of brought the kid out in me again," he said. "I always thought it would be cool to find something of this magnitude."
earlier related report "I want to return to meet some of the leaders of the Xikrin-Kayapo tribe who invited me," the Canadian director said in an interview published in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper. "I want to take a 3D camera to film how they live, their culture," said Cameron, whose blockbuster movie Avatar tells the story of the peaceful Na'Vi people who live in harmony with nature on the planet Pandora and wage a bloody fight against strip-miners from Earth. The filmmaker has already come to the Amazon twice in a show of support for the indigenous tribe and to film a short piece on their resistance to the damming project on the Xingu River, which will be included on the "Avatar" DVD to be released around Christmas. Speaking of the fight against the dam construction, Cameron said he "did a film on the same topic," referring to Avatar, adding that when he was asked to help "the Brazilian Indians, who were desperate, I could not turn away." President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gave the green light last week for the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant on the Xingu River, a southern tributary to the mighty Amazon. Work is set to begin on the project either late this year or early 2011. Opponents of the dam project say it is not economically viable and would cause the displacement of 16,000 people because it would create a flood zone of 500 square kilometers along the banks of the Xingu. The government says no indigenous land would be threatened and that it has spent millions on reducing the social and environmental impact of the dam.
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Farmland comes at expense of forestsPalo Alto, Calif. (UPI) Sep 3, 2010 More than 80 percent of the new farmland created in the tropics since 1980 has come from felling forests, which drives global warming, researchers say. A study led by a Stanford University researcher says global agricultural expansion cut huge swaths through forests, mostly tropical forests, from 1980 to 2000 when half a million acres of new farmland was created, a university release sa ... read more |
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