In the last couple days, these two stories made the news in Colorado Springs, CO or, as I fondly call it, Jesustown.
ARMY RECORDS STOLEN
FORT CARSON, Colo. (AP) - The Army said Monday that thieves stole computer equipment containing Social Security numbers and other personal records of a number of soldiers, some of whom are serving in Iraq.
Fort Carson spokeswoman Dee McNutt said she did not know how many soldiers' records were involved or how many of them are in Iraq but that no cases of identity theft had been reported.
[snip]
Computers or hard drives were stolen in mid-August from a building on the post in Colorado Springs where soldiers get identification cards and update their personnel records, McNutt said.
Records taken also included soldiers' date of birth, rank, unit, citizenship and job.
McNutt said the soldiers and their families have been warned to watch their credit card and bank statements in case someone uses their records to open accounts or make unauthorized purchases.
The Army's Criminal Investigation Command is investigating, but there are no suspects, McNutt said.
No suspects, eh? How could it be anything other than an inside job? It would be rather difficult to get on an Army base, don't you think?
Clues to dinosaur extinction may lie buried in Colorado Springs
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) - Kirk Johnson swung his pickax against the base of Pulpit Rock and broke off a football-sized chunk resembling a piece of cake thinly layered with light and dark chocolate.
A gentle whack against its side split it open to reveal a perfectly preserved, three-pointed, prehistoric tree leaf the size of a man's hand.
[snip]
During a three-day dig, the team gathered dozens of similar fossils from Pulpit Rock and at an outcropping along nearby Rusina Road. The two sites are among many in the area that Johnson, chief curator of paleontology at the museum, and other scientists visit in their quest to reconstruct life through the ages.
"Colorado Springs is one of the best places in the world to see the history of the Earth," Johnson said, because of its exposed or easily excavated prehistoric molten rock and caches of volcanic ash, mud and sand.
[snip]
"We are trying to build the geology of the Rocky Mountains as of 65 million years ago," Johnson said. "We are trying to understand how the landscape changed and reconstruct the Rocky Mountains."
Eventually, Johnson and his team will publish their findings in news articles and scientific journals, use results of their research to update museum exhibits and include it in future lectures. But that will take a while.
"We take a bag of leaves and can tell what the forest looked like," Johnson said. "We'll dig up 400 or 500 leaves and study them."
The leaves gathered last week will help him determine whether the landscape was arid or a rainforest or made up of conifers and pine trees -- at least, ancient predecessors of today's tree species.
"We're looking here at a whole suite of leaves that are previously undiscovered and undescribed," Johnson said. "We've found a couple kinds of conifers and a couple of ferns and broadleafs. But exactly what they are, we don't know."
The one thing he is sure of is that the leaves were between 65.5 million and 68 million years old.
Johnson thinks the latest leaf lived on a tree during the Cretaceous period -- a time when the 5-ton Tyrannosaurus rex lumbered to the top of the food chain and the lush forest also was home to the plant-eating Triceratops, as well as other dinosaurs, birds, mammals and other organisms.
The evidence is buried within Pulpit Rock, a spired outcropping of white, layered sandstone that rises near Interstate 25.
More than just a striking landmark, Pulpit Rock has survived 10 million years of erosion by Monument Creek -- erosion that also unearthed and created the world-famous rock formations in Garden of the Gods, the hogbacks of Red Rock Canyon and hoodoos throughout the area.
Pulpit Rock is a vault, of sorts, where Mother Nature stored fossil clues -- like the leaves, as well as dinosaur bones, volcanic ash pits and even grains of pollen -- for scientists like Johnson to use.
In most places on Earth, these vaults remain deep underground. They are accessible around the Springs because of a dramatic uplift about 68 million years ago that created Pikes Peak and the Front Range.
The uplift was so powerful that it thrust up tons of granite to create the 14,115-foot mountain. Elsewhere, you have to dig 14,000 feet below the surface to find Pikes Peak-type granite.
The uplift also bent and pushed to the surface layers of rock formations that define each era spanning 500 million years. Those layers have been exposed by erosion from wind and water, and scientists now mine them for clues to the past.
Perhaps the most important clue is a centimeter-thick layer of clay, laced with unique space dust called iridium.
Scientists generally believe an asteroid the size of the Air Force Academy smashed into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula -- a violent collision that incinerated the atmosphere and caused an eruption of ash that blanketed the globe, wiping out most plant and animal life on Earth, including the dinosaurs.
The ash -- with its space dust, crystals and soot from global fires -- eventually compressed into the layer of clay that lies buried beneath 65.5 million years of sedimentary rock.
It separates two distinct periods of time on Earth -- the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs lived and became extinct, and the Tertiary, which gave rise to the age of mammals.
The thin layer of clay is known as the K/T boundary (K for the German spelling of Cretaceous and T for Tertiary) and some think it runs throughout Colorado Springs.
"The boundary is so important because it is a precise marker in geologic time," Johnson said.
So prospecting above and below the boundary allows scientists to more accurately date their fossils and reconstruct life.
If you've never been to Jesustown, err, Colorado Springs, it sits at the foot of Pikes Peak and is surrounded by incredible geologic formations. I've always found it interesting that so many of these formations have been christened with very religious sounding names by people who believe the earth is only a few thousand years old. The fundies who say God put fossils on earth to challege us must be feeling really uneasy in Jesustown about this story.