12-year-old discovers dinosaur vertebra in Greene County
Tuscaloosa News – June 22
Middle school student Aiden Taylor was excited to start his summer at a dusty camp in the heat of rural Greene County hunting for dinosaur bones. “I was just hoping to find anything. I wished to find dinosaur bones or some mosasaur bones,” said the 12-year-old from Bay Minette. Finally, the boy, whose fascination with dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals began as a young child, was on an expedition. He was part of a group of middle school students participating in the annual summer field program put on by the University of Alabama Museum of Natural History. Aiden’s first expedition became the latest entry in the story of a rare set of fossils in the state slowly emerging from the chalk deposits near Eutaw. Taylor discovered a vertebra from an elasmosaur, Cretaceous-Period, long-necked leviathans that prowled a sea whose shoreline traced along Alabama’s Black Belt region approximately 80 million years ago. In 2013, another camper discovered the first fossils from the large marine reptile — the inspiration for the Loch Ness Monster myth — at the small quarry in rural Greene County, a site frequented by the annual summer field program.
Tuscaloosa News (gallery) – June 22
Al.com – June 23
Washington Times – June 23
ABC 33/40 (Birmingham) – June 22
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) (5 p.m.) – June 22
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) (6 p.m.) – June 22
What do you think? Healthcare services survey underway in southeast Baldwin County
Al.com – June 22
Residents of southeast Baldwin County are being encouraged to participate in a healthcare services survey. The University of Alabama Center for Economic Development and the Alabama Small Business Development Center Network have teamed up give the public a sounding board on the future of medical services in Baldwin County, south of Interstate 10 and east of Alabama 181. Yolanda Johnson, a local counselor for the small business development network, has been pounding the pavement in recent weeks spreading the word about the survey at council meetings and club gatherings. “The survey is for southeast Baldwin County to help determine what the people actually think they need and want as far as healthcare services in this area,” Johnson said. “This is a survey of everyone’s opinion and the university is conducting this as a community service, if you will, through the economic development center. So many times we want to complain but there has to be numbers backed behind what we think and we’re trying to prove those numbers.”
The Charleston Massacre and the Rape Myth of Reconstruction
We’re History – June 22
As Dylann Roof massacred nine people in cold blood after they studied the Bible together on Wednesday night at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, he told a church member who survived that he felt compelled to carry out the murders. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country,” Roof said. “And you have to go.” We might take such a bizarre statement as a sign that this act of racial terrorism was also the act of a lunatic. But if Dylann Roof is deranged, his derangement is deeply steeped in a history of white supremacy that has long expressed the threat of black economic and political power in sexual terms. Apologists for slavery often contended that people of African descent were by nature bestial, and that they would surely revert to a state of savagery without the discipline of enslavement. These fears continued to haunt the white southern imagination through the era of emancipation and Reconstruction, as terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan gained support from significant segments of the white southern populace in the late 1860s by claiming they acted as forces of law and order against hordes of black thieves and rapists intent on causing mayhem and despoiling white women. (Joshua D. Rothman is Professor of History and Director of the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. He is the author, most recently, of Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (2012), and is currently working on a book about the slave traders Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard.)
How a UA doctor allowed a black widow spider to bite his finger for science
Al.com – June 22
Using forceps, Dr. Allan Walker Blair, a physician on the University of Alabama medical school faculty, grasped the black widow spider, pulling it from a jar in his Tuscaloosa laboratory. He held the glossy black spider to the end of his little finger. Blair was conducting a science experiment on himself: What would the effects of black widow venom be on a human? It was 10:45 a.m. on Nov. 12, 1933. Blair had no idea of the agony that lay head. “The spider bit the moment it came in contact with the skin surface,” Blair wrote. “The sensation resembled that of a prick of a very sharp needle, accompanied, however, by a burning sensation which increased in intensity during the biting period.” Despite anecdotal evidence the spider bite was extremely dangerous, there was, at the time, “skepticism in the literature that so small and timid a creature could be capable of producing such severe general symptoms in man,” Blair wrote in his study, “Spider Poisoning” published in “The Archives of Internal Medicine,” December 1934, and reviewed by AL.com at the University of Alabama at Birmingham archives.
Rhino Concessions brings on summer interns
Greenville Business Magazine (S.C.) – June 22
Rhino Concessions, a food service provider for several Greenville County parks and sister company to FunnelDelicious, has brought on two marketing interns for the summer. Allie Buckelew, a graphic communications major at Clemson University, is focused on promoting FunnelDelicious in the Greenville community. Her knowledge of graphic design, as well as her energy and work ethic, are valuable assets to the Rhino team … Turner Waddell is a public relations and French double major at the University of Alabama. This summer, she will focus on customer service and operations at the recreation locations that Rhino serves in Greenville and Easley, as well as Rhino’s social media presence. Waddell will be involved in surveying customers in order to facilitate improvements, promoting Rhino’s refillable mug program at the waterparks and expanding the number of healthy, LiveWell-approved options available from Rhino Concessions.