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Brian Frick is the Associate for Camp and Conferences Ministries with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). He has been involved in camp and conference ministry since high school. For the past ten years, Brian has served as program director of Johnsonburg Center in New Jersey, Westminster Woods in California, and Heartland Center in Missouri.

Camp and conference ministry compliments and partners with other ministry aspects of our church to foster faith development and reflection. As our communities and our church changes, our ministries need to grow and adapt with creative and emergent programming and leadership to meet new realities.

These blogs entries, though varied, are intended to spur thought and conversation around the opportunities and challenges before us.

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December 23, 2009

Exciting, pre-historic news from Ghost Ranch!

Brian Frick

 


Once again Ghost Ranch is rocking (pun intended!) the scientific world with a unique dinosaur find!  Below is an excerpt from the article published this month in Science Magazine. 

Vanclevea Martz

Newly Discovered Dinosaur Illuminates Ancient Lineage

Tawa hallae a new species of small carnivorous dinosaur discovered at

Ghost

Ranch

Conference

Center

 near Abiquiu New

Mexico

 is the oldest North American dinosaur known from almost complete skeletons.  This discovery provides new information on the evolution of early dinosaurs and their dispersal across ancient continents.

 

When

Darwin

’s finches diverged from their common ancestor, the isolation of their island home allowed many species to arise from one.

 

When their dinosaur ancestors emerged in the Late Triassic Period about 230-210 million years ago, the island home was the unified continental landmass of Pangea, and the evolution was more complicated.

 

In the Dec. 11, 2009 issue of Science, a team of paleontologists presents fossils of a previously unknown dinosaur Tawa hallae, including several of the best preserved dinosaur skeletons known from this time period.

 

Based on an analysis of the relationships among Tawa and other early dinosaurs, the researchers hypothesize that dinosaurs originated in what is now South America and soon diverged into theropds (like the much later Tyrannosaurus rex), long necked sauropodomorphs (like Seismosaurus) and ornithischians (like Triceratops); and they dispersed across the Triassic world more than 220 million years ago.

 

“Tawa gives us an unprecedented window into early dinosaur evolution, solidifying the relationships of early dinosaurs, revealing how they spread across the globe, and providing new insights into the evolution of their characteristics,” says Sterling Nesbitt of the

University

of

Texas

 at Austin, the lead author on the paper.

 

(To read the rest of the article, go to Sciencemag.org and sign into your account.)

The research was sponsored by the National Geographic Society with other participating institutions including the

University

of

Chicago

, the Field Museum of Natural History. The Utah Museum of Natural History, Stony Brook University and the Ruth Hall Museum of Paleontology at Ghost Ranch Conference Center.