[Video opens with Dr. Mathews standing next to a large fossil.]
Dr. Mathews: When you think about a fossil, this is what you think about. This is a fossilized dinosaur bone. A fossil is something that belonged remnants of a life form, usually plant material, perhaps an animal that has been fossilized and has survived over geologic ages. This is quite an impressive foot and leg. You can imagine that this particular dinosaur was quite impressive in its life time.
[Camera view change to show another fossil.]
Dr. Mathews: Here is another example that is from the local area. I should tell you that I am in the College of Earth and Science Mineral Museum just down the corridor from there. But as you look up on this wall you will see the tusks of a mastodon. This was found in the Huntington area and was dug up while someone was digging a ditch. And this mastodon or wooly mammoth, these are some very impressive tusks, but I have seen larger ones too. And these are also remnants of a life form, a very large elephant in this case. And now we are going to look at some evidence that fossil fuel, particularly coal, was actually derived from this material.
[Camera changes view to show other fossils.]
Dr. Mathews: This is another example; this is a fossilized tree stump. And you can look at the bark feature. You can actually identify what former species this was. I can't tell exactly what this one is but it is called paleobotany. And it is a little like forensic scientists for the botanists. When they go and look at the various imprints in the leaves and barks and they can identify trees that were alive millions of years ago. Here is another example of a tree. This one is actually coal. You come across these occasionally in coal mines. You can come across whole trees standing either vertically or horizontally. And it is actually coal. You can also see occasionally see what miners will call coalified snakes. It is really the bark that happens to look like a diamond back rattail snake. You see it in the shale and you can also see it in the plant imprints ferns and other material. Well coal was formed over much of the geological ages, most of it well before the Jurassic period, which is what you recognize from Jurassic Park and the mosquitoes in the amber. There are also other examples of dinosaur foot prints in coal. There are two at the MS museum, this is one of them.
[Camera changes views to show another fossil.] Dr. Mathews: This is a duckfin bill dinosaur and actually the scale is actually correct and the measurements of this are true this could actually be the world's largest footprint of this species. Quite an interesting find and was donated to the Penn State Museum by the Chester Field Coal Company.
[Camera zooms into an article title: Footprints of an Ancient Armored Salamander (Stegocephalian).]
Dr. Mathews: This is another Pennsylvania coal mining example. This particular roof of the coal mine, it was obvious that there were footprints for they saved them and donated them to Penn State. These are footprints believed to belong to an ancient armored salamander. If you recall, during geological ages we first saw a swamp, so you can imagine the salamander walking over the swamp and the peat leaving its footprints in the peat and of course the peat finally became coal. Fortunately for us, you can see the footprints are very well preserved. And you can get a lot of information such as the size of the animal by its depth and the frequency of its steps.
[The camera zooms into several different footprints in the coal.]
Dr. Mathews: This is another piece of purified fire wood. This is on the third floor of Steidle. What you can see is the obvious tree shape and swirls and scarring that you would recognize in a fallen tree today. It is just that this one is about 320 million years old.
[Video ends zooming into this petrified tree.]