On September 6th, 2015, the Charlotte Observer covered the growing use of geological technology by paleontologists like UNCG’s Dr. Robert Anenome in order to find fossils. The newspaper article follows the growth of hi-tech gadgets in paleontology and how these can enable people working in the field to find not only more fossils, but also new sites completely hidden from the surface.
“Anemone, a professor of anthropology at UNC Greensboro, is one of the first paleontologists to borrow some of the high-tech gadgets from geographers’ toolkits and use them to locate fossil sites that may have otherwise remained elusive.
One such gadget uses a remote-sensing technology called LIDAR and could one day help unearth a fossil site’s most guarded secrets…
By scanning locales already known to be fossil-dense, then plugging the data into a predictive computer model that uses satellite imagery to find sites that share those similar characteristics, paleontologists like Anemone can learn more about the nature and formation of sandstone – the material in which the fossils he studies are found – and also the whereabouts of more of them.”
