James Craig Adamson is a former NASA astronaut and retired Colonel of the United States Army. He is married with 3 children. James Adamson flew on two missions, STS-28 and STS-43, and completed 263 orbits and 334 hours in space. After retiring from NASA, he was recruited by Allied Signal where he retired in 2001. Adamson has logged over 3,000 hours in over 30 different types of helicopters and airplanes.
Bryan Daniel O'Connor is a retired United States Marine Corps Colonel and former NASA astronaut. He was inducted into the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2008.
Edmontosaurus is a genus of hadrosaurid (duck-billed) dinosaur. It contains two known species: Edmontosaurus regalis and Edmontosaurus annectens. Fossils of E. regalis have been found in rocks of western North America that date from the late Campanian stage of the Cretaceous Period 73 million years ago, while those of E. annectens were found in the same geographic region but in rocks dated to the end of the Maastrichtian stage of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. Edmontosaurus was one of the last non-avian dinosaurs, and lived alongside dinosaurs like Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Ankylosaurus, and Pachycephalosaurus shortly before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
The Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL) was a facility at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. It was the only facility in the Space Shuttle Program where actual orbiter hardware and flight software can be integrated and tested in a simulated flight environment. It supported the entire Space Shuttle program to perform integrated verification tests. It also contained Firing Room Launch Equipment identical to that used at KSC. Thus complete ground verifications, as well as countdown and abort operations, could be tested and simulated.
Saurolophus is a genus of large hadrosaurid dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period of Asia and North America, that lived in what is now the Horseshoe Canyon and Nemegt formations about 70 million to 68 million years ago. It is one of the few genera of dinosaurs known from multiple continents. The type species, S. osborni, was described by Barnum Brown in 1912 from Canadian fossils. A second valid species, S. angustirostris, is represented by numerous specimens from Mongolia, and was described by Anatoly Konstantinovich Rozhdestvensky.
Kritosaurus is an incompletely known genus of hadrosaurid (duck-billed) dinosaur. It lived about 74.5-66 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous of North America. The name means "separated lizard", but is often mistranslated as "noble lizard" in reference to the presumed "Roman nose".
Agathaumas is a dubious genus of a large ceratopsid dinosaur that lived in Wyoming during the Late Cretaceous. The name comes from Greek, αγαν - 'much' and θαυμα - 'wonder'. It is estimated to have been 9 metres (30 ft) long and weighed 6 tonnes, and was seen as the largest land animal known at the time of its discovery.
The Houston Museum of Natural Science is a natural history museum located on the northern border of Hermann Park in Houston, Texas, United States. The museum was established in 1909 by the Houston Museum and Scientific Society, an organization whose goals were to provide a free institution for the people of Houston focusing on education and science. Museum attendance totals over two million visitors each year. The museum complex consists of a central facility with four floors of natural science halls and exhibits, the Burke Baker Planetarium, the Cockrell Butterfly Center, and the Wortham Giant Screen Theatre. The museum is one of the most popular in the United States and ranks just below New York City's American Museum of Natural History and Metropolitan Museum of Art and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in most attendance amongst non-Smithsonian museums. Much of the museum's popularity is attributed to its large number of special or guest exhibits.
Sonorasaurus is a genus of brachiosaurid dinosaur from the Early to Late Cretaceous. It was a herbivorous sauropod whose fossils have been found in southern Arizona in the United States. Its name, which means "Sonora lizard", comes from the Sonoran Desert where its fossils were first found. The type species is S. thompsoni, described by Ratkevich in 1998.
The Burpee Museum of Natural History is located along the Rock River in downtown Rockford, Illinois, United States, at 737 North Main Street.
The Edmontosaurus mummy AMNH 5060 is an exceptionally well-preserved fossil of a dinosaur in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Discovered in 1908 in the United States near Lusk, Wyoming, it was the first dinosaur specimen found to include a skeleton encased in skin impressions from large parts of the body. It is ascribed to the species Edmontosaurus annectens, a hadrosaurid. The mummy was found by fossil hunter Charles Hazelius Sternberg and his three sons in the Lance Formation. Although Sternberg was working under contract to the British Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn of the AMNH managed to secure the mummy. Osborn described the fossil in detail in 1912, coining the name "dinosaur mummy" for it—several dinosaur mummies of similar preservation have been discovered since then. This specimen has considerably influenced the scientific conception of hadrosaurids. Skin impressions found in between the fingers were once interpreted as interdigital webbing, bolstering the now-rejected perception of hadrosaurids as aquatic animals, a hypothesis that remained unchallenged until 1964. Today, the mummy is considered one of the most important fossils of the AMNH.
Edmontosaurus annectens is a species of flat-headed and duck-billed (hadrosaurid) dinosaur from the very end of the Cretaceous Period, in what is now North America. Remains of E. annectens have been preserved in the Frenchman, Hell Creek, and Lance Formations. All of these formations are dated to the late Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous Period, representing the last three million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs. E. annectens is also found in the Laramie Formation, and magnetostratigraphy suggests an age of 69-68 Ma for the Laramie Formation. Edmontosaurus annectens is known from numerous specimens, including at least twenty partial to complete skulls, discovered in the U.S. states of Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It had an extremely long and low skull and was a large animal, up to approximately 12 metres (39 ft) in length and 5.6 metric tons in average asymptotic body mass, and may have been even larger. E. annectens exhibits one of the most striking examples of the "duckbill" snout common to hadrosaurs. It has a long taxonomic history, and specimens have at times been classified in the genera Diclonius, Trachodon, Hadrosaurus, Claosaurus, Thespesius, Anatosaurus and Anatotitan, before being grouped together in Edmontosaurus.
Tyrannosaurus is one of the most iconic dinosaurs and is known from numerous specimens, some of which have individually acquired notability due to their scientific significance and media coverage.
The retirement of NASA's Space Shuttle fleet took place from March to July 2011. Discovery was the first of the three active Space Shuttles to be retired, completing its final mission on March 9, 2011; Endeavour did so on June 1. The final shuttle mission was completed with the landing of Atlantis on July 21, 2011, closing the 30-year Space Shuttle program.
Titanoceratops is a controversial genus of herbivorous ceratopsian dinosaur. It was a giant chasmosaurine ceratopsian that lived in the Late Cretaceous period in what is now New Mexico. Titanoceratops was named for its large size, being one of the largest known horned dinosaurs and the type species was named T. ouranos, after Uranus (Ouranos), the father of the Greek titans. It was named in 2011 by Nicholas R. Longrich for a specimen previously referred to Pentaceratops. Longrich believed that unique features found in the skull reveal it to have been a close relative of Triceratops, classified within the subgroup Triceratopsini. However, other researchers have expressed skepticism, and believe "Titanoceratops" to simply be an unusually large, old specimen of Pentaceratops.
The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology is a paleontology museum in Claremont, California, that is part of The Webb Schools. It is the only nationally accredited museum on a secondary school campus in the United States. The museum has two circular 4,000 sq. ft. exhibition halls and 20,000 unique annual visitors. The collections number about 140,000 specimens, 95% of which were found by Webb students on fossil-collecting trips called “Peccary Trips,” expeditions usually centered in California, Utah, and Montana. The collections consist primarily of vertebrate, invertebrate, and track fossils and the museum's large track collection is widely recognized as one of the most diverse in the world.
The Edmontosaurus mummy SMF R 4036 is an exceptionally well-preserved dinosaur fossil in the collection of the Naturmuseum Senckenberg (SM) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Found in 1910 in Wyoming, United States, it is ascribed to the species Edmontosaurus annectens, a member of the Hadrosauridae. The fossil comprises a nearly complete skeleton that was found wrapped in impressions of its skin, a rare case of exceptional preservation for which the term "dinosaur mummy" has been used. Notably, the horny beak is preserved with this specimen. Plant remains found within the thorax cavity had been interpreted as stomach contents, although later research questioned this identification. The mummy's hands are wrapped in skin impression, which was interpreted as evidence for interdigital webbing and an aquatic lifestyle in hadrosaurids; this hypothesis, although universally accepted once, is now widely refused. SMF R 4036 is one of the four best preserved hadrosaurid mummies, and was the second to be discovered. The find was made by fossil hunter Charles Hazelius Sternberg and his sons, who sold their numerous finds to various museums in North America and Europe. Only two years earlier the Sternbergs had discovered the Edmontosaurus mummy AMNH 5060 in the same region, which is now on display at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York.
The Mace Brown Museum of Natural History is a public natural history museum located on the campus of The College of Charleston, a public liberal arts college in Charleston, South Carolina. The museum has more than 30,000 vertebrate and invertebrate fossils. The collection's focus is on the paleontology of the South Carolina Lowcountry.
Big John is a fossilized Triceratops horridus skeleton discovered in South Dakota's Hell Creek geological formation in 2014. It is the largest known Triceratops skeleton, according to the team that assembled the fossil. Big John's 2021 auction price of €6.6 million made it the most expensive Triceratops skeleton.
