Rhomaleosaurus?

The crude panorama above is taken from Sand Turn, on Highway 14 in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, facing east on the left,  and south on the right.  You can see how the strata to the south has been uplifted by the mountains, almost as if they were waves lapping at the shore.  I've stopped at Sand Turn every time I've passed that way, to look out over the vast plains to the east.  One of my geology professors noticed the view, and remarked that he'd spent a summer geology camp there, and that one of the campers had picked up a large fossilized femur one day.  My brother's company was doing some surveying there, and mentioned that to the rancher.

In the summer of 1999, the rancher was using a cat to move rock from a limestone ledge, so that he could build a fence there, and he discovered this fossil (the coin is a USA Sacajawea dollar), approximately where the red v points in the middle of the panorama.  I carried it back to North Carolina, and showed to to a professor at the University of North Carolina, who referred me to a researcher at North Carolina State University, who referred me to Dr. David Martill of the University of Portsmouth in England.  I furnished photos, and a geological map of the area (prepared, partly, during the summer geology camps).  He suggested that it was a humerus with radius and ulna, possibly from an early Jurassic pliosauru such as Rhomaleosaurus, which would be the first such found in the United States.

Stars in the daytime

This is a sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico, from a beach near Destin, Florida (05:46 CST 22 Nov 2010).  The white dot up in the clouds is Venus, barely more than a pixel, about 40% from the left, 80% up.  Venus, when it is visible, is always very bright, fifteen times brighter than the brightest star.  That morning I watched it disappear behind the clouds, but the clouds burnt off later in the morning.  The sun was fully visible when I mentioned over breakfast that Venus was still in the sky and I looked up and found it almost immediately.  I'd never done that before, although I'd found Venus in the day sky many times, usually by first using binoculars and calculating its position in the sky.  Sometimes I've showed it to groups of elementary school kids--who could usually see it much easier than I can.  Views of Venus may have contributed to the myth that stars can be visible during the daytime.

To me, one of the most remarkable coincidences in astronomy is the consistency of the brightness of Venus.  Brightness of a planet varies as the inverse square of the distance, and our distance to Venus varies more than any other planet, because Venus gets so close to Earth.  However, when it is close, we see its dark backside, and very little of its sunlit side.  The two opposing effects neatly cancel each other, and the net result is that our perception of Venus is that it changes very little in brightness.  It is always close to the sun in our view, because it is closer to the sun than the earth, but whether it is on the other side of the sun, or on this side of the sun, there is very little difference in its brightness, the total range is less than one magnitude.  Mars varies by over four magnitudes, Mercury over eight, and even far away Jupiter and Saturn vary by over a magnitude.