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Follow the dinosaur tracks and master the game of science.
Science Cafe, a national program that gives the public a chance to talk with scientists in casual settings, will “open” in Fort Wayne on Thursday.
Locally, the free events are organized by the Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne chapter of Sigma Xi, an international honor society for research scientists and engineers.
Renowned paleontologist James Farlow will discuss his ongoing work studying dinosaur tracks. His brief presentation begins at 6:30 p.m., followed by plenty of time for questions and discussion, at Firefly Coffee House.
Farlow, a professor in IPFW’s geosciences department, has returned to Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas for 30 years. For the past two summers, he’s also taken crews of students from IPFW and Manchester College.
“This is one of the world’s largest concentrations of fossilized dinosaur footprints. There are a lot of them, they’re big and … quite well preserved,” he says.
While the Glen Rose Formation in central Texas is home to plenty of dinosaur footprints, this particular area in the state park is the “big enchilada” of track sites, Farlow says.
The tracks are in and around the Paluxy River bed, which cuts through layers of limestone, sandstone and mudstone that were deposited about 113 million years ago, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
“The river was unusually low this year, I got to see some tracks I’ve never seen before. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Farlow says.
The research teams have taken thousands of photos from an elevated platform so they can try to answer the big questions: How many animals lived there and what were they doing? How does one set of tracks relate to the others?
It likely will take them several years to figure out the answers, Farlow says.
Meanwhile on Nov. 2, IPFW physics department chairman Mark Masters will discuss “The Game of Science” during the second Science Cafe event. (More will be scheduled in 2010.)
“If I talked about my physics research, I might put people to sleep,” he says, joking. “It’s not as exciting as dinosaurs.”
Instead, Masters will engage the crowd with a general exercise he often has his students do in class as a simplified, hands-on simulation of research.
He’ll show a series of moves from an unnamed game, and then ask the audience to figure out the game and its rules.
“This is the whole idea behind what we’re really doing in science. … We’re trying to figure out the rules,” he says.
