Saudi Arabia, Facing Dwindling Oil Income, Raising Government Fees, Fines -- WSJ -- August 10, 2016

Active rigs:

	8/10/2016	08/10/2015	08/10/2014	08/10/2013	08/10/2012
Active Rigs	33	72	193	184	200

RBN Energy: important article on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG - propane and some butane) export cancellations.

Saudi Arabia raises government fees and fines to raise revenue -- The WSJ.

Saudi Arabia, faced with dwindling oil income, has sharply increased government fees such as visa charges as part of a range of measures aimed at raising revenue from non-oil sources.

Under the new rules approved by the Saudi government, foreigners will have to pay $800 for a six-month visa, six times the current cost.

The government also announced hefty fines for traffic violations that include drifting, a practice that involves intentionally skidding and spinning at high speed—a popular pastime for men in a country that notoriously lacks entertainment options. First-time violators will face fines of 20,000 Saudi riyals ($5,332). It also more than tripled the fees it charges to advertise on billboards.

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For The Archives

Nothing will come of this, but important for the archives. From Townhall on the recent DNC staffer deaths.

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The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt

William Nothdurft with Josh Smith

c. 2002

DD: 567.909 NOT  

The Bahariya Depression, western Egypt.
First explored by Ernst Stromer, 1910 - 1914
Stromer's isolated cone-shaped hill: Gebel el Dist

Geology

• Cretaceous Period: anywhere between 66 and 144 million years ago; really rich dinosaur deposits
• badlands of the western US and in Canada
• In Cretaceous times, many of these areas were on the shorelines of great shallow seas -- exactly what one sees when looking at geologic maps of Egypt's Western Desert

Dinosaur background

• Sir Richard Owen, 1842, coined the term "dinosaur"
• Vertebrates: fish and tetrapods (limbs)
• Tetrapods: amphibians and amniotes (former return to the water to reproduce; the latter figure out how to keep embryos moist on dry land)
• Amniotes: synapsids (led to mammals) and reptiles (led to dinosaurs) 
• Saurischchians would come to dominate the Bahariya 95 million years ago just as ornithischians would predominate in many other areas of the Northern Hemisphere during the Cretaceous Period
• Dinosaurs distinguished themselves from all other creatures on the Earth roughly 230 million years ago: by standing upright on two strong hind legs; their center of gravity in front of their hip junction; counterbalanced by a long and heavy tail
• The dinosaurs split into two groups: ornithischians and the saurischians; both names misleading
• Ornithischian: "bird-hipped"
• Saurischian: "lizard-hipped"
• Refers to orientation of one bone in the pelvis, the pubis
• Ornithischians: pubis points backward beneath the hip (as in modern birds)
• Saurischians, in most cases: pubis points forward (as it does in modern lizards)
• No one knows why the different orientation
• Ornithischians evolved into three broad groups: Thyreophora, Marginocephalia; and, Ornithopoda; all were herbivores
• Thyreophora: spikes and plates across their backs; stegosaurs
• Marginocephalia: thick, bony skulls and horns; Triceratops (which by the way --> birds)
• Ornithopoda: mostly bipedal beaked and duck-billed dinosaurs
• Saurischians: again, predominant form in western Egypt; two primary groups: the sauropods and the theropods
• Sauropods: like the ornithischians, herbivores; small heads, long necks, equally long tails; grew so big, they had to walk on all fours; the largest, the titanosaurs, may have weighed as much as a hundred tons
• Theropods: get all the attention; fearsome carnivores; feet with three functional toes; abundant throughout the Mesozoic Era; ranged in size from 43-foot-long Giganotosaurus to the pigeon-sized Microraptor
• Theropods: the only kind of dinosaur that survives today -- as birds
• "Our story": not the theropods, but the sauropods (look liked "brontosauraus")

The 1999 - 2000 expeditions

• Josh Smith, Jennifer Smith, and Robert Giegengack, University of Pennsylvania
• At el Dist
• bones everywhere
• no paleontologist had been there since Stromer
• everything Stromer had found had been lost in destroyed museum during WWII

Chapter 10: the importance of western Egypt; a a theory of why this particular dinosaur ended up here
Epilogue: the dinosaur found -- a tidal giant and a new genus and species of dinosaur, never before known

• second largest dinosaur to date: Paralititan stromeri (Argentino, among others, are larger)
• "Paralic": tidal (compare "riparian" -- a term I first learned of while blogging about the Bakken)
• "Titan": obvious (enormous beast)
• "Stromeri": obvious

Reader's Digest version in The New York Times
Bottom line

• Order: Saurischia
• Suborder: Sauropodomorpha
• Clade: Neosaurapoda
• Clade: Macronaria
• Clade: Titanosauria
• Genus: Paralititan