Mini T-Rex found

remember the SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION?? There was some truth in the rock in the fence that marked the spot where Dufresne hid the money in a fence in MAine. Several volcanoes of Triassic age had tossed up some deposits of obsidian in the maritimes and along the Tr basin margins from Va to Fundy. These deposits got ground out and exposed by glacial gouge and your piece of obsidian may have been part of some kind of glacial deposit.

Do you still have the obsidian and are not senile enough to have forgotten where you found it? A museum would be happy to recieve and run a thermo scan on i9t for their collections in structural geology.

ALmost 99% of the obsidian found in the US , however, comes only from about 10 states and all W of Minnesaota. I kinda doubt that any of those locations were the source for your piece of obsidan, unless of course, it was carried as part of a "wepons tool kit" by some PAleo Indian.


I loved Mt monadnock, its like a big blob of sculptured rocks laying on a field of differently sculptured rocks. Its a neat problem for teaching about mapping uplift and erosion events in Appalachian history.

I heard so m uch about the minirex today on Canadian and PBS radio that it almost seems like "settled science"

Unfortunately I no longer have that chunk of obsidian. And I don't remember where we were in Vermont. I found it when I was about 6 years old and kept it for several years but eventually lost it (along with other childhood treasures, like a big bag full of fossilized sharks teeth I had collected over the years).

The obsidian chunk was a little bit larger than a softball and completely black except for some other bits of cement-like material stuck to parts of it.

I was always finding cool stuff when I was a kid. Here's another one I never figured out...

A completely spherical rock that I found in my driveway. It was smaller than a golf ball, but larger than a marble. It was un-naturally spherical (perfect as far as I could tell), but it wasn't made out of glass (otherwise I would have thought it was just a worn marble). The stone material was a slightly reddish color with a small worn crack running through it. I imagined that it was an "Indian Marble" (a rock worked into a sphere by some ancient culture), but I never knew for sure, and I don't even know if indians ever made such things.

I found the rock in my driveway which was piles of rocks which probably came from a quarry which sold broken material like that for developments, so there's no telling where that spherical rock actually originated. It could have come from the mid-west in a shipment of gravel or something.

you live in an area thats loaded with glavial and stream washed gravels. A combination of a glacial gouge gravel that was later further rounded in a stream is not uncommon. We have these "tools" that are found in the SUsquehanna potholes wherein rocks get bounced around and form these huge potholes in the diabase rock that is the bedrock of the Susquehanna from Harrisburg South to the York County line. The black "Tool rocks" (those that actually do the grinding of the pothole get rounded into almost pwerfect spheres and people go diving for them to polish and make chochkies. Theres no danger of having the tool rocks disappear because new ones are always washed down the river and getting caught up in the pothole regions. Ive heard that, during the Revolution, the cannon around Harrisburg, which was briefly our national capital while they moved toYork Pa, were armed with rock cannonballs. I dont know how they pounded the tool rocks to fit the cannons but "Iron bloom cannon balls" were not made anywhere near Harrisburg so they did with what they had.


BAck to mini Rex. I heard that theyve done a computer scale up and the mini v Maxi Rex are almost entirely scale perfect. This will make the entire Horner argument about scvenging seem less credible, especially when mini rex was apparently rather fleet of foot . His argument was predicated on a fact that birds of similitude to T Rex all have these "stubby wings" and that conformed to a rather clumsy waddle gait because they werent able to keep perfect balance. Well, when you scale it down, running is enhanced by NOT having wings in the way especially if the body plan is slim and trim as the mini rex skeleton suggested. Mini rex ws maybe more like a running kangaroo perhaps.

The use of rock for cannonballs was common for centuries.

Yeah

The Susquehanna pothole rocks are pwerfect in their shape. I just assumed that they had to be further refined to fit in the barrel of the cannon. (Unless they packed wooden break -apart cannisters with rocks too.

I don't know if canister was ever made using rocks. But, in fact, as far as cannonballs are concerned, it was a regular chore of gunners to chip away irregularities in shot before it was used, and with cast iron shot it was often necessary to chip away excrescences from rust. The term windage was used to denote a difference in the internal diameter of the barrel of a cannon or musket, as well as the anticipated drift of a projectile fired. It was accepted both in cannon and in muskets that there would be windage with the shot--shot for both cannon and muskets was produced with a shot tower. Molten lead would be dropped from a height into cold water, and then hand milled to meet specs. I suspect that with round shot from rock, it was simply milled by hand. Another method for removing rust excrescence from cast iron shot was to roll it back and forth in a canvas sling filled with sand. That could have worked with stone shot as well. The method to eliminate any lessening of muzzle velocity due to excess windage was to pack the shot in with wad. The windage of muskets used in the wars called the Napoleonic wars was so commonly significant that soldiers would drop the shot into the barrel after tearing it from the cartridge and then simply slam the butt of the weapon on the ground to drop the shot into place, after which the remaining paper from the cartridge would be rammed home as wadding--and sometimes they didn't even bother with that.

By the way, the accuracy of black powder weapons of all kinds was so notoriously unreliable that officers didn't expect much from it, and tended to rely upon the "moral force" of a bayonet charge to dislodge the enemy. Modern studies suggest that 1% or less of musket shots found a target with any appreciable effect. A German gentleman did a study of the battle of Mollwitz, the first in which Frederick the Great commanded the Prussian army, and decided that 2% of musket balls found a target with effect. He based this on the evidence that the Prussians had fired off 350,000 rounds of small arms, and had inflicted 7,000 casualties. It was likely closer to the 1% mark, though, since that figure ignored the proportion of Austrian casualties who were listed missing (captured, surrendered or taking "French leave"), and it ignored how many casualties were inflicted by artillery, and by "white arms"--which is to say the sabers and lances of cavalry.

As for naval artillery, the Royal Navy only allowed a commander sufficient powder and shot to fire off a number of rounds equivalent to one third of the rated armament in the first six months of a commission. This meant that a frigate rated at 30 guns could only fire ten rounds in six months time for training purposes. The best a commander could do with that stricture was "dumb show," where the gun crews ran guns in and out, and shouted "Bang!" Commanders who could afford it (private means or prize money) would buy powder to train their gun crews if they believed in gun crew efficiency--or they could take powder from a prize and use it for the purpose. Many (perhaps most) naval commanders in the age of wooden ships and sail were of the opinion that the best thing to do was to close to yardarm-to-yardarm range because one could hardly miss then. The Americans made mince meat out of RN frigates at the beginning of the War of 1812 because American crews were commonly exercised with "the great guns" every day, and the ships' commanders wouldn't willingly let the English close to pistol shot range. Regular practice also meant that good gun crews could fire broadsides much faster than the competition. David Farragut, the naval hero of the American Civil War, first shipped out in U.S.S. Essex in 1813, at the age of 12. In his memoirs, he comments (and the ship's log suppports his claim) that the captain had them exercise small arms and the great guns every day. American musketry practice was deadly, too. When U.S.S. Constitution took H.M.S. Java early in 1813, every officer on deck was wounded or killed in the course of a 30 minute engagement.

I have no data on the opinion of T. Rex with regard to small arms practice and exercising the great guns.

I should have mentioned that back when I was a kid (when I found that little rock ball) I lived in New Jersey.

I also found this...
The one on the right looks almost exactly like what I found (same texture on the surface). The only difference is that I remember mine as being slightly more reddish in color.


Here's a link to some info on Moqui Marbles.
http://www.rocksandminerals.com/specimens/moqui.htm

I'm really not sure if that's what I found or not. I never broke mine open to see what it looked like inside.

Moqui marbles , if thats what you had, are actually concretions of goethite and hematite formed in specific sand formations . There are several taxts that just deal with specific types of concretions (secretions and excretions) and their environments. The giveaway that its a concretion is the ridge on the nodule which always parallels bedding planes. (Kinda funky to have something used as a directional indicator)

There are people who collect just concretions (and the others I mentioned ). Geodes are NOT usually considered a concretion because they are usually the same composition as the rock in which they are found whereas a concretion is always of different composition.

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