Welcome to this
episode of Bone Hunt Discovering Dinosaurs with AI.
I'm Bob Chesebrough, I'm a solution engineer and a technical evangelist
supporting oneAPI AI here at Intel Corporation.
In the last episode, we talked about how you can recognize dinosaur bones,
but you won't have much success finding them
unless you look for them in the right place.
Fortunately, there are ways that you can determine
where the specific places that may net you the most success.
One way is to use a geologic map that shows the strata
and whether the rocks are igneous or sedimentary.
We look for dinosaur bones in the sedimentary rocks
of the correct geologic age, and we use a geologic map to isolate
whether the Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous periods.
Triassic was the earliest, the Jurassic was the middle,
and the Cretaceous was at the end of the dinosaur era.
For this series, we are mainly focused on the Jurassic period, somewhere between
155 million to 145 million years ago
because of the prolific dinosaur bone beds from that period.
The geologic features that we are looking at from
this time is called the Morrison Formation.
The Morrison formation features many members within it.
There are different members depending on their location.
For example, in the southwest area of the United States,
there are three members
of the Morrison formation exposed in New Mexico, where I am located.
First is a Tidwell member,
followed by the Salt Wash and then finally by the Brushy Basin.
The first thing you need to do
is consult a geologic map to look for the more information.
If you break the Morrison into more specific units,
look for the Brushy Basin member, which is a real juicy target
in the timeline.
The Brushy Basin is roughly a 10 million year timeframe, between 145
million to 155 million years ago, according to geologists.
Before we go on, here's a little paleontology history.
The famous dinosaur bone wars from Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker
Cope took place in New Mexico, Utah and specifically
an area called Como Bluffs, which is located in Colorado.
During their rivalry, they would destroy each other's finds
as they were racing to get their own finds back to the museums in the East.
They initially struggled with each other intellectually on papers, but soon
their rivalry escalated and got nasty, destroying bone sites and stealing things.
Eventually, it brought both men into a little bit of ruin.
The Brushy Basin is part of the Como Bluffs makeup
where much of this conflict occurred.
The Brushy Basin member can be found all over the western United States
and this map shows where the outcrops of the Brushy Basin are exposed.
The types of soil and context can and will impact the success of your hunts.
The members of the Morrison Formation are what we call
alluvial deposits or river deposited sediments.
Sometimes those deposits occurred in slower
moving areas with more clay like a marshy, muddy area.
And then there were river channels that would go through there as well.
The river channels carried larger pebbles.
These rivers were typically closer to the mountain ranges in the southwest area.
These rivers drain from the mountains down towards the seaway in the northeast
or into a lake.
These rivers were pretty energetic and you can see
the energy evidenced in the types of rock.
In many cases, the rocks have larger cobbles, class and pebbles in them.
These are the areas where dinosaurs came to the water
to drink and many potentially lived near these rivers.
So when they would die, they would occasionally fossilize in those rivers.
Some of their bones may have been decayed,
or perhaps a scavenger would pick up them, but some bones would get washed down
the river where they would be deposited into sandstone beds
and those larger cobbles and pebbles in that energetic area.
And that's where we find a lot of bones, bentonite clay areas
from a unique situation because the clays are often different colors.
What we see nowadays after it's been exposed is a variegated color of grays,
pinks, purples and olive greens,
typical of bentonite clays.
Then typically the sandstones would be yellow tones, yellow,
green or orange in color, and sometimes just in the interface
between the bentonite, clays and sandstones, we find dinosaur bones.
Often these sandstone beds are formed
on top of the bentonite clay, which is very soft and will wash away.
So the sandstone on the clay is like a birthday cake
sitting on top of Neapolitan ice cream on a hot day.
As the ice cream melts, the cake is no longer supported
by anything solid and will break into pieces and chunks.
So that's similar to sandstone, which also breaks away in chunks
the patterns of boulders and chunks, the variegated coloring pattern,
and the color and texture patterns are what we are trying to identify,
because that's where you tend to find the bones.
The ice solution we developed is designed to try to find those patterns
and textures that are being exposed through erosion.
Now that we know where to look, we can progress towards labeling,
feature engineering and other AI tasks.
That's all for this episode of Bone Hunt
Discovering Dinosaurs Using A.I..
You can find links to resources, tools and downloads as well as where
to learn more about everything in this series in the description.
Remember to like and share this video and subscribe to the Intel Software
YouTube channel.
We'll discuss data collection, training and cleaning in the next episode
as we continue our dinosaur hunting adventure.
Let the adventure begin!