Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_13 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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for an article in a major professional journal. It is one example of the museum's ongoing collaborative research with universities and institu- tions around the world. Exploration and research has been stepped up in recent years, in part prompted by public interest and support. Schneider, a museum volunteer for more than 16 years, became the museum's first full-time curator of paleontology about five years ago. At the same time, Dale Russell, a renowned dinosaur re- searcher, accepted a joint position with the museum and North Carolina State University. The partnership offers new possibilities for discovery and interpre- tation of untapped natural treasures beneath the state's expansive Coastal Plain. Participants of museum-led field studies probe surface sediments rich in Cretaceous deposits along the Cape Fear, and other riverbeds, mines and quarries that are abundant with marine and river fossils. Importantly, the new museum provides ample space for fossil laboratories and collections. Until recently, important finds often went to other museums, including Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, where the first dinosaur bones unearthed in North Carolina in 1869 reside. Now, lightening, thunder and the screeches of winged reptiles heighten our sense of danger as we move deeper along the Cretaceous path toward the great fossil hall. Raptor-like dinosaurs peer anxiously from mangrove ferns into the "Terror of the South" exhibit. Suddenly, we encounter
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Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, the museum's 110 million-year-old predatory dinosaur, fully engaged in an unmerciful attack on a towering Pleurocoelus, a plant-eating sauropod. The fearsome scene follows an actual prehistoric attack "scripted" by fossilized dinosaur footprints, Schneider says. Casts of those prints are incorporated in the scientifically accurate recreation. "Aero," the most complete specimen of its kind, was found in Oklahoma and purchased for the museum collection in 1997. The early Cretaceous monster lived nearly 45 million years before Tyronnosaurus rex., was the only giant North American carnivore of its time, and ranged across low, coastal plains from Texas to Maryland. The "high- spined" lizard is the centerpiece of the museum's impressive collection of dinosaurs that roamed North Carolina's prehistoric coastal environ- ments for millions of years. As we walk around and under the awesome "Aero" and compare our shoe size with the mighty prints, we imagine the sudden cataclysmic force that caused these giants to disappear from Earth's horizon. C o n t i n u e a WILLO IS SAID TO BE THE MOST COMPLETE THESCELOSAURUS EVER FOUND. THE SMALL SWINE-LIKE HERBIVORE WAS BURIED MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO IN SOUTH DAKOTA. LATE CRETACEOUS PERIOD TERTIARY PERIOD QUATERNARY mi-' 1 00 million 50 million PRESENT !- CENOZOIC ERA (includes Paleocene, Eocene, Pliocene and Holocene Epochs) COASTWATCH 23

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